Glen Powell, Hollywood’s last great male hope: ‘If you’re looking for the definition of a movie star, that’s him’

It was Jamie Lee Curtis who told him that he would be a “big, big movie star.” But, for nearly two decades, Glen Powell was denied the chance to try to become one. So cruel and unforgiving was the film industry to him that his first agency chose to stop representing him, telling him that he’d be “lucky to be cast as a dead body in a crime show.” They were wrong. In barely six months, that dead guy has breathed new life into the romantic comedy genre with Anyone but You, as well as claiming the global top spot on Netflix playing an unlikely assassin in Hit Man. Now he is also starring in the ultimate blockbuster with Twisters, a sequel to the 1990s thriller that is aiming to sweep the summer box office, with critical acclaim already in his back pocket. After years of a tireless search by the major studios to crown the great male face of the new Hollywood, perhaps the answer was right under their noses.

“He’s talented, he’s handsome, he’s smart and he’s worked it like nobody’s business,” said filmmaker Richard Linklater, who has directed Powell twice (Everybody Wants Something and Hit Man), summing up the keys to the success of the charismatic 35-year-old Texan with the million-dollar smile and abs of steel. Another of his professional godfathers, Tom Cruise, made a surprise appearance at the London premiere of Twisters recently to support a protégé — while promoting his own Instagram account — who has become his star pupil on and off the big screen. After sharing the billing in Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise invited Powell to a Los Angeles movie theater to screen him a didactic video, reserved “for close friends only,” in which the actor spent six hours breaking down directly to camera all his accumulated knowledge about the seventh art. “Doing Top Gun together changed everything. Tom is the best. He’s a great friend and mentor and has become a very special part of my life,” said Powell.

Although he made his film debut at the age of 13 with a small part in the children’s film Spy Kids 3: Game Over, it wasn’t until he was 19 that Powell decided to leave his native Austin and his university studies to conquer the hills of Los Angeles. He was taken in by the legendary agent Ed Limato, who had previously molded stars including Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson. It was he who taught him the path he had to follow if he wanted to emulate his 1990s references: “Ed always told me, over and over, that the definition of a movie star is somebody who guys want to grab a beer with — fun, not threatening — and who women want to date and bring home to meet their parents,” he told The New York Times.

But Limato’s early death left him an orphan in the profession and he had to make a living as a script reader for noted producer Lynda Obst (Interstellar). Powell has admitted that he spent every day reading on the terrace of the cafeteria at Sony studios hoping, as if it were a movie, that some big shot would accidentally stumble upon him and give him a longed-for opportunity.

He didn’t get it. He spent more than a decade reconciling small film and television roles with failed casting opportunities that carried the potential to turn his career around, Captain America or Han Solo being glaring examples. His first leading role, in Netflix’s romantic comedy Set It Up, came about only because he had served as a supporting actor for Emilia Clarke and, when the Game of Thrones actress left the production, they decided to give him a chance before the whole project had to be canceled.

The film’s success led Powell to bet on the revival of a genre that seemed amortized, but he refused to let Anyone but You, starring alongside Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney, be released exclusively on a streaming platform. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Powell admits they had offers from various companies “with ostensibly bigger payrolls and budgets,” but they preferred to go for the “cultural impact” that only theaters offer. They got it. After opening to disappointing box office in its first weekend, word of mouth and the marketing strategy followed by Powell and Sweeney — who played up a possible romance between them — turned Anybody but You into an unexpected blockbuster, topping $220 million worldwide.

“If you’re looking for the definition of a movie star, that’s Glen,” said actor Jon Hamm (Don Draper in Mad Men). “The smile, the hair, the tan, the muscles... and he wants it, he loves it and he’s good at it.” Accustomed in recent years to young stars, tormented, nihilistic and apathetic about everything related to fame and glamour, eager for the Cronenberg of the moment to look at them with festival eyes and keep the alienating blockbusters out of their way, Powell’s case resonates because he is unequivocally happy and proud to want to be a star like those of yesteryear: popular, loved, commercial and powerful. Of putting, at least for the moment, the complicity of viewers and distributors ahead of that of critics and academics. “To be a lasting success in Hollywood, you have to make people money,” he told the NYT. “I always find it lame when actors are like, I just want to act in the movie. I don’t want to promote the movie. If you want this career, part of your job — a big part — is doing everything you can to help sell your movies. Doing publicity matters. You’ve got to give people a reason to care.”

Powell strives to be that reason. He’s turned his dog Brisket into another actor on his promotional tours and an Instagram icon. His parents have paraded down the red carpet with signs that read “Stop trying to make Glen Powell succeed,” and he even does viral TikTok dances. So frenetic is his schedule — he also writes and produces — that he claims to be unable to pay attention to his love life after breaking up with model Gigi Paris over a year ago.

Despite being at the peak of his career, Powell has just built a house in Austin to shelter himself, his parents, and his two sisters from the noise of Hollywood. He also intends to enroll on the four courses he has left to finish his degree. It will depend on whether Twisters, in which he plays a sort of cowboy who chases tornadoes for his YouTube channel, allows him to have time to hit the books or, on the contrary, confirms Lee Curtis’s prediction and anoints him, at last, as the star of the cinematic summer.

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