The Glen Powell Network

13 Nov

Glen Powell’s Secret: “I Try to Think Audience First, Rather Than Me First”

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 047

VANITY FAIRHollywood’s most bankable new star on struggle and strategy.
There’s a lot of talk about how handsome Glen Powell is and how he’s bringing back the vibe of the old-school Hollywood leading man. But if you want to understand who he is deep down, just note that when he got the chance to write his own lead role, he made himself the dorkiest character imaginable—one who masquerades as a succession of increasingly ridiculous figures in outrageous outfits and absurd hair.

That was Netflix’s Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater, a fellow Austinite who gave him his big break in 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! We’re thrilled to have Powell as part of our 2025 Hollywood Issue. Here, he delves into not just his impressive string of hits, but also the lean years when he was a Hollywood nobody. If he happened to get invited to the party back then, he says, he’d have to smuggle in his own drink in a flask because he was so broke.

Vanity Fair: In Hit Man, your character gives a speech in which he talks about living on the edge, and how you’ve got to have some danger and excitement in your life. There are many things not to live your life by in that movie, but that’s not a bad message, is it?
Glen Powell: You don’t want to take all the lessons from it. [Laughs.]

Your filmography is very eclectic. You’ve got romantic comedies like Anyone but You, you’ve got big-budget tentpoles like Top Gun: Maverick, visual-effects action movies like Twisters, you’ve got indie-feeling, cross-genre films like Hit Man. Are you deliberately mixing it up to avoid being pigeonholed?
When it comes to that, the thing I’ve really tried to chase is a feeling, like, “I hope I have it in me,” right? I’m trying to do ambitious things that scare me a little bit, because when they scare you, it means that you have to rise to the occasion.

You don’t just want to do the thing that has already been a success.
I understand why some people would just play the greatest hits. But at the same time, you get into trouble when you’re trying to diversify for the sake of diversification, and you leave the audience out of it. And that’s where I try to be really thoughtful. I try to think, “Audience first,” rather than, “Me first.”

What does the audience want to see? How can I fit into a role that really challenges what I do, where I’m not settling into any sort of groove that feels too familiar or too monotonous? Do you know what I mean?

I do. You see that phenomenon all the time: Actors will have a number of hits and then suddenly get the chance to make something they want—and they make something that nobody else wants to see!
Yeah, totally. There’s always been this phrase, “One for me, one for them.” And I just completely disagree with that idea. I think it can be all for them, and it can be all for you, and you just have to be really deliberate about what you’re a part of. You just have to find roles that are flavors that you’ve never explored, or just because a movie’s smaller doesn’t mean it has to be unappealing to an audience. I find that there’s this interesting creative drunk driving where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to go do a small movie for me, a big movie for them.” That’s not a plan.

People refer to you as a classic movie star. You’ve got the matinee-idol good looks, but you also have the instinct to make stories that don’t just rely on that. I think it’s interesting that the movie you cowrote, Hit Man, has you in all of these ridiculous costumes and haircuts.
For me, I’m just having fun. Hit Man is an example of a kind of movie that I really, really like, but also I got this great joy out of wondering if I could pull it off. The more I researched the real-life Gary Johnson, the more that I was like, “Wow, this is a tall order and not necessarily a natural fit.” Gary and I don’t share, I would say, a lot in common in terms of the way we orient our lives, and yet it’s really fun to step into the skin of someone like that.

It doesn’t seem like the kind of movie studio executives were offering you.
Hit Man was one of those that really taught me. The business—as we were selling it—didn’t understand what it was. We pitched it around town and people were like, “Oh, great, we want to be a part of this.” Then they were like, “Actually, we don’t want to be a part of that. Can we change that?”

And [director Richard Linklater] and I were always excited about the potential of what we were creating. It was unique and it was different. Audiences couldn’t get out ahead of this movie. It didn’t really fit into one genre.

To get to create that kind of story, you have to have status. Do you feel that there is a performance aspect to just being a lead actor in this industry? In addition to being in front of the camera, do you have to play a part in Hollywood?
I’ve failed for a lot longer than I’ve succeeded. I’ve really gotten a chance to see other people do it. And what I realized is, I think the trap is trying to fit into the mold of something like that where it’s inauthentic.

I guess what I was thinking about was the New York Times article in which you and Sydney Sweeney talked about playing up flirtatiousness in public, even though you weren’t in a relationship, because that’s what the audience of a rom-com like Anyone but You wants.
I think what people forget about with a press tour is that it’s its own sense of entertainment. I don’t think it’s duplicitous. For Twisters, I had the best time because I’m getting to literally live in a world of trucks, and tornadoes, and the South, and country music, and all these different things where I was like, “This is authentically all me.” Shotgunning a beer onstage with Luke Combs is press, but that’s also something that I had the greatest time doing. That was so damn fun.

It sounds like you’re saying you and Sydney would have to be actual friends to play up that kind of thing.
I love her. She’s the greatest. If you’re not having fun with this job, then I think you get burnt out. We just had a really good time. So we have just such a great friendship and really cheer for each other and it’s been a fun ride to do this thing together.

What was it like for you in the years when you weren’t in demand, when you were in your 20s?
As a struggling actor, there’s no harder place to live than being in Hollywood with nothing going on. The currency of that town is how relevant you are and what your last job is. It makes you oppressively self-aware. Where people can get caught in a rut is where they just want to continue spinning the roulette wheel without any thought of why. They just stay at the table for no reason other than to stay at the table.

How did you cope with having nothing going on?
Even at the darkest moments in that town, when I really didn’t have anything happening, you sort of have to lie to yourself, at least a little bit, and act like this is that chapter of the story where things just aren’t going right. You have to believe in the Hollywood legends of those people that you admire, the people that you’re chasing, that had those long stretches of famine as well. I’m very grateful about getting a chance to understand a lot about writing. I had to occupy different types of jobs that allowed me to understand how to finance things, and produce things. I started understanding a facet of this business that’s really serving me right now.

What type of things were those?
I’d hit random people up and I’d try to drum up money for other people’s shorts to turn them into features, or I’d try to hunt down stuff and pitch people to get a small role in things. In LA, you are really just hustling to just try to be a part of the experiment at all. People are like, “Oh man, auditioning must be tough.” And I’m like, “No, auditioning is a luxury.”

Finding an agent, finding anybody to talk to you at a damn party, having enough money to pay for headshots, these are the things that no one talks about. Trying to pay for acting class, and trying to get better. Auditioning feels like you’re at the party. You’ve gotten past the velvet rope. You may not be able to afford a drink at the party, but you’re in it, you can taste it. But so often in Hollywood, most of the time you are outside that velvet rope. Most of the time the bouncer is not even allowing you anywhere in the vicinity.

What kind of bit parts paid the bills?
That’s the other interesting thing about this business right now—how much it’s changing. The business no longer supports struggling actors the way it did when I was kind of coming up. I would do an episode of NCIS, and that would keep me afloat for a year. You know what I mean?

But only if you’re careful with the money.
My overhead’s not high. You’re not living a lavish lifestyle. You’re hiding a flask in your boot if you go out for a drink. You’re not necessarily able to afford anything significant in that town, but you are able to stay there. Those little jobs, like getting a commercial, keep life in the system.

What’s it like doing a small part in a big movie? I saw one of your credits on IMDb was a stock trader in The Dark Knight Rises, which is a massive movie, but you’re only a small part in a machine like that. What do you remember about doing that?
I remember everything. You never forget the feeling. It’s something I carry to every set I walk on now, which is just the reverence for being on a set in general. But I remember on Dark Knight Rises the feeling of being able to walk onto a set and you knew everybody in the world wanted to be on that set, right?

Even though it was a small role, I auditioned several times for it. I was getting to work with the greatest director on the planet, Christopher Nolan. And you’re sitting there and all of a sudden Tom Hardy walks in as Bane. It’s electric. It’s sort of out-of-body. That was one of those movies when nothing was going on in my life. I was just fighting for every inch. And when Christopher Nolan casts you in his movie, it’s a validation that’s hard to explain. And I’ve talked to Chris about this. We’ve run into each other at different things. I saw him during his amazing Oppenheimer run, and he’s very proud that he plucked me early. I’m just very grateful that he took a shot.

Posted by jen under Gallery, Glen Powell, Photoshoots, Press
31 Aug

Glen Powell Talks Rom-Coms, Texas Roots, & Rising to the Top

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 046

Read the full article at Sharp Magazine’s website .

Glen Powell is feeling unusually confident. It’s a Tuesday night in December 2007, and the young Texan actor is on the red carpet at the Cinerama Dome at the ArcLight cinema in Los Angeles for the premiere of the Denzel Washington–directed drama The Great Debaters, in which he has a small but juicy part as the Harvard debater Preston Whittington. Nobody is paying much attention to Powell, whose most prominent screen credit to date had been as “Long-Fingered Boy” in Spy Kids 3D. But Washington’s publicist eventually persuades a solitary camera crew to come his way.

“This guy’s in the movie,” the publicist tells the reporter, who seems skeptical that speaking to this beaming, bushy-haired teenager will be worthwhile. But Powell’s grin, so open and affable, is difficult to resist. “Okay,” the reporter replies warily. “I guess we’ll interview you.”

Powell speaks eagerly about having been cast by Washington on the strength of a live table read, about what it was like to shoot on the Harvard campus, about what he learned at the gruelling debate camp where he and other actors were sent to bone up before the shoot. The reporter, clearly running out of questions, rounds out the conversation with a softball, asking Powell if he has any resolutions for the new year. Powell, with a glint in his eye, doesn’t hesitate. “I want to be Denzel Washington,” he says.

This must have sounded outrageously brash, if not outright presumptuous, considering that at the time Powell had only barely begun the long and arduous process of proving himself in the entertainment business. But looking back on this moment now — and laughing at his show of mock bravado — even somebody as humble as Powell can admit that maybe his playful red carpet boast had been on to something. Between the stratospheric commercial success of the blockbuster disaster flick Twisters, the near-universal critical acclaim of the awards-season hopeful Hit Man, and the TikTok ubiquity of the future classic romcom Anyone But You, Powell has been decisively coronated as one of the biggest movie stars of his generation — the Denzel Washington, if you will, of a new era.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and this is the first time where I can definitely feel a shift,” Powell says. “I got to have a really amazing year where I promoted Anyone But You and Hit Man and Twisters, three movies I’m incredibly proud of, and I feel really grateful for this moment. But right now, I’m just excited to get back into acting, which is where I feel the most like myself.”

He laughs, glancing out the window of the car that’s taking him to LaGuardia, where he’s set to fly to South Africa to continue shooting Huntington, the black comedy with Ed Harris and Margaret Qualley. He looks back my way. “And I’m excited to maybe not have to read a headline for a while, you know?”

Powell tells me that he had reason to feel confident that night on the red carpet in 2007. Only hours earlier, at a dinner with the cast and crew, Washington had introduced him to the legendary talent agent Ed Limato, who had urged Powell to seize this moment by giving up school and moving out to Los Angeles. If he was serious about this acting thing, Washington and Limato agreed, “Now is the time.”

11 Jul

Perfect storm: How Twisters continues the legacy of a classic blockbuster with some, well, twists

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 045

Read the full article at the Entertainment Weekly website.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, and director Lee Isaac Chung take EW inside the making of their blustery “standalone sequel.
“We got cows.”

The Twister line was inescapable following the blockbuster disaster film’s release in 1996, but it’s just as apropos over a quarter century later on a Universal soundstage as Anthony Ramos joins his Twisters costars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones on the Universal City, Calif., set of their Entertainment Weekly photo shoot.

Powell’s rescue pup Brisket has been everyone’s favorite guest all morning, but Ramos walks in with his own companion: an inflatable cow he’s named Nancy. “Nancy’s a star,” Ramos declares of the petite plastic pet he’s carried with him since CinemaCon in Las Vegas the weekend prior. Indeed, Nancy has been all over social media — but she’s about to be upstaged as Ramos enters the set and discovers a life-size cow statue. “Oh, s—,” the Hamilton and In the Heights alum exclaims. “It’s Nancy’s mom!”

The talk of offspring is fitting, given the actors have gathered to promote their follow-up to the Helen Hunt-Bill Paxton hit. (All involved avoid calling it a traditional sequel, instead using terms like “standalone sequel” or “current-day chapter” — meaning it exists in the world of the original film but with no continued story or returning characters.) Smiles burst across their faces when discussing the 20 million views their Twisters Super Bowl trailer has racked up on YouTube and the thunderous applause they received at their CinemaCon presentation. But they get more serious when asked about the first time they saw the original, Powell leaning in to share his memory. “Growing up in Texas, Twister was one of the most iconic movies of all time,” the Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You star tells EW. “You grow up in Tornado Alley, and that’s the monster that exists in your own backyard.”

It’s an experience Powell shares with his Twisters director, Lee Isaac Chung, the Oscar-nominated writer and director best known for his quiet, semi-autobiographical 2021 Best Picture nominee Minari. Twisters executive producer Steven Spielberg & Co. learned of Chung’s ability to direct action from his work on Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian and upcoming Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, but, more importantly, the Golden Globe winner grew up in rural Arkansas near the Oklahoma border. “From what I understand, they were hoping that they could find a filmmaker who comes from the area,” Chung explains. “There’s just a feeling when you’re living in that part of the country where you have to be humble to nature and to weather. I wanted to bring that feeling of what it’s like to live in that part of the country and deal with nature: to be in awe of it, to fear it, but also to be in love with it. I wanted to combine all of those things in this movie.”

The team started working off a script by Mark L. Smith (The Boys in the Boat, The Revenant) from a story by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, who’d signed on to helm Twisters in 2020 before leaving for another project. (In 2021, Helen Hunt expressed interest in directing a Twister sequel she was writing with Daveed Diggs, but it never came to fruition.) Chung loved Smith’s “smart” script but also collaborated with his cast to flesh out their characters: Edgar-Jones as Kate, a former storm chaser who gave up her pursuits after a fatal “wrong call” while studying at Muskogee State University (the alma mater of Hunt and Paxton’s Twister characters, though neither is referenced in the new film); Powell as Tyler, a former rodeo star who has amassed a large social media following as a “tornado wrangler”; and Ramos as Javi, Kate’s former classmate who persuades her back into the field to help his company, which is developing technology to help predict tornado strikes.

“It really felt like a story just about Kate and Tyler, and Javi was kind of like the segue,” Ramos says of the first script draft he read. “But now, it truly feels like he’s in the center of that. We feel the connection between him and Kate throughout the film. We really worked to develop Javi in a way where it felt like, ‘Oh yeah, no, we need this guy.'”

And Javi needs Kate, traveling to New York to convince her to return home to Oklahoma and the profession she left behind. “What jumped off the page to me was that this character had sort of PTSD, really,” Edgar-Jones says of Kate. “But she’s trying what she can to move past it in order to help other people. I found it very interesting that throughout the script, there’s this idea of taming a tornado. Storms can be such a great metaphor for inner turmoil, and I think Kate is trying to tame both.”

When Edgar-Jones and Ramos heard Chung was attached, they jumped at the chance to work with the director, whom the cast refers to by his middle name. “The idea of seeing someone like Isaac — who’s so incredibly good at crafting relationships and stories and character — take on this huge scale of a project was so exciting,” says Edgar-Jones, who wrote a letter to Chung detailing how she felt she was on a similar career trajectory, ready to graduate from smaller projects like Normal People (which garnered her a 2021 Golden Globe nomination). Adds Ramos: “Sometimes when these big movies come around, maybe the script doesn’t feel like it’s all the way there. Or it feels like they pick a director who can just get bossed around by the studio. But when I saw Isaac was directing this, I was like, ‘Nah, this feels different. I know that this guy’s going to do this film in a way where we really care about the people, and we really want them to survive, and we really want them to win.'”

Then there’s Tyler, established in the movie’s first trailer as an arrogant influencer who sells merch with his face on it. “I understand that when my function within the movie is fun, I get to be a wild, rowdy cowboy,” says Powell. “While everyone else is driving as quickly away from a tornado as they possibly can, I’m the guy driving directly into it. It was just a blast to play. Tyler is who everyone wants to be, the guy that’s hollering and screaming and laughing when the chaos is happening.”

But, unlike the original film, Twisters gets cloudy when it comes to who you’re rooting for. Kate and Javi? Tyler? Tyler and Kate? Even visually, things are inverted — with Tyler’s ragtag team of chasers (played by Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O’Brian) much more akin to Hunt and Paxton’s band of misfits, and Javi’s crew uniformed and well-funded like the group led by Cary Elwes’ arrogant Jonas in Twister.

“I found those dynamics of shifts in characters and allegiances very refreshing because I feel like, culturally, we’re at a moment where we often look at each other as black-and-white antagonists, that we are polar opposites of other people,” says Chung. “We often don’t look at the gray zone that all of us are in. But what I like about Mark’s script is that he’s portraying people in their complexity, with this idea that all of us have good and bad — and the hope is that we find a way to come together, especially in the context of greater societal issues, such as the fact that storms are intensifying in this country.”

According to Chung, the closest thing to a Jonas character in the new film is Javi’s business partner Scott (played by James Gunn’s new Superman star David Corenswet). And stepping into the fish-out-of-water (cow-in-the-air?) role filled by Jami Gertz in Twister is Downton Abbey and The Crown actor Harry Hadden-Paton as Ben, a risk-averse British journalist writing a profile on Tyler.

“This is an incredible ensemble, so many amazing actors who have been the lead of their own movies,” Powell says of the cast, which also includes Maura Tierney, Kiernan Shipka, Daryl McCormack, and Nik Dodani. “I wouldn’t say that this movie’s like a normal movie in the way that you know who’s going to end up in a tornado and who’s going to end up on the ground because everybody’s a star in their own right. The fact that Lee Isaac Chung was able to bring this group of people together, I think, is really going to keep the audience on the edge of their seat to see who makes it to the end.”

02 Jun

Summer’s Hottest Duo: Glen Powell and Adria Arjona

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 044

Read the full article at the InStyle Magazine website:

The co-stars of Netflix’s new flick ‘Hit Man’ sat down with ‘InStyle’ to talk fame, sex scenes, and reality tv.
“Hey, buddy. You are not a guard dog!”

Glen Powell’s dog, Brisket, has started to bark. We’re sitting at Edge Studios in Los Angeles, discussing Powell’s new film Hit Man alongside his co-star Adria Arjona and, for most of the interview, Brisket has been happily tended to by the small cadre of assistants, publicists, and stylists that appear out of the ether whenever an actor is promoting their latest project. But someone had breakfast delivered, and Brisket (all 10 pounds of him) has decided to take it upon himself to protect us from the stranger at the door.

“You are not a guard dog,” Powell repeats.

But a tiny, adorable, well-behaved dog pretending to be something a lot tougher than he is couldn’t be a better metaphor for Hit Man. In the Richard Linklater–directed film, Powell (who also served as co-writer and a producer) stars as Gary, a mild-mannered philosophy professor at a New Orleans university who moonlights with the police department arranging sting operations for would-be criminals who think they’re hiring killers. Gary quickly realizes he has a knack for shape-shifting in order to meet the marks, with elaborate personas ranging from a dead-on American Psycho impression to a persnickety oddball with a ginger bob and the mannerisms of Tilda Swinton.

It’s while he’s in character as fake hitman “Ron”—a walking leather-jacket with a devil-may-care attitude—that Gary meets Madison (Arjona), a young woman looking for a way out of a controlling marriage. Their chemistry is immediate, but Gary realizes that if he has any chance of wooing Madison, it’s only so long as he remains “Ron.” At the same time, he has to decipher whether Madison’s murderous intentions were just a moment of desperation or evidence of a deeper, darker drive.

Adria Arjona leaning on her hand in a striped and ruffled shirt.

Some actors are forced to put their professional skills to work during press interviews in order to convince the world that they like each other. But as I observe Arjona (Andor, Good Omens) and Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You) over coffee, it’s obvious that these two actually like each other. They talk and joke and finish each other’s sentences. Before they sit down, they compare the tricks used to prep for today’s early morning cover shoot—Arjona sat in a steam room; Glen plunged his face into a bowl of ice water.

That natural chemistry that Arjona and Powell have when they’re just existing as human beings is part of what makes Hit Man such a fun film: The actors felt comfortable enough with each other as they were rehearsing to pitch new ideas and see where the characters took them. It was a collaborative process, they tell me, in which the two actors always felt they were supporting each other. “It’s like, I have your back and you have mine,” Arjona says.

In one particularly memorable scene, Arjona’s Madison acts as seductress while role-playing as a flight attendant. I ask Arjona if that was her idea. “Fuck,” she laughs. “The flight attendant was my idea.”

Glen Powell leaning on his hand in a white blazer.

“It was your idea!” Glen exclaims. “Everybody’s going to think I’m just living this Top Gun sexual fantasy here. No, it’s all Adria.”

Hit Man manages to achieve an all-too-rare distinction in the pantheon of romantic comedies: It’s actually sexy. It’s also funny, charming, and romantic—a feat of genre balancing that displays the full range of both Arjona’s and Powell’s movie-star prowesses. While Brisket entertained himself with his cadre of admirers, Arjona and Powell turned their attention to InStyle for an in-depth conversation on imposter syndrome, reality TV, and the process of making an erotic thriller with a romantic-comedy tucked away at its center.

Posted by jen under Gallery, Glen Powell, Hitman, Photoshoots, Press, Projects
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