He Is Glenough

Written by jen on November 14 2023

Glen is the cover boy for the December issue of Men’s Health! Pick up a copy next week!

MEN’S HEALTH – Hype is swirling around Glen Powell, the star of ‘Anyone But You,’ but he has other things on his mind—like getting in the best shape of his life, making great movies, and maybe even . . . finding love?
It has become trite compare friendly, happy men to golden retrievers, but actor Glen Powell’s retrieverdom is clinical. This man cannot help but look warmly, excitedly, and adoringly at whoever is near. Onscreen, such as when he played Hangman in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, the role that brought his career from a simmering breakout to a boil, he can be a dick. Offscreen, he is hopeless.

While Powell was in Australia this past spring filming Anyone but You—a romantic comedy that he will not discuss when we meet in September, out of solidarity with the actors’ strike (any reflections on specific projects included here were gathered during an interview conducted after the strike ended)—he joined his costars in taking in the sights. He got caught in the rain. He rode atop a double-decker bus. He went to the zoo and fed a giraffe a carrot. In every photo, Powell had a wide grin on his face, like a kid on a roller coaster—this, he tells me, is called “the Powell face,” and his whole family is prone to it. In shots with his costar Sydney Sweeney from their Australia interlude, along with one well-documented appearance at CinemaCon in April, he looked overjoyed—he looked, many thought, very much in love.

These photos were coupled with news of Powell’s split from model and designer Gigi Paris; specious reports from the Daily Mail of strife between Sweeney and her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (who in spite of being “photographed carrying a bag and a dog bed out of their shared L. A. home” is still engaged to Sweeney); and an Instagram post from Paris, who had evidently unfollowed both Powell and Sweeney, captioned “know your worth & onto the next.” Suddenly everyone was certain that Powell and Sweeney were having a passionate affair, chaperoned by an Australian giraffe. The evidence was in their eyes.

Except that Powell looks at everyone like that. (Sweeney, too, suffers from resting baby-bunny face.) I experience this myself on an early fall afternoon on the patio of the restaurant at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. It’s a gloomy day and the restaurant is thinly populated and subdued, but when Powell bounds in behind the hostess, the few other diners perk up. He’s wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the logo of Caliwater (in which he is an investor), a Speedmaster watch from Omega (for which he is a “friend of the brand”), and a navy polo shirt from Brioni (for which he is the face of a new campaign), as well as jeans and beige suede shoes (no apparent affiliation). He looks lovingly at the hostess as she seats him, and then he looks lovingly at the server who takes his order for the first of three iced coffees with almond milk that he will consume in the next few hours. He cannot possibly be having a secret affair with all of them. His default facial expression seems to be simply “I love you.”

Getting into dick mode for Top Gun: Maverick required significant forethought and research, in fact. He and his co-star Tom Cruise discussed the role extensively: “We would watch movies and talk about certain actors that he was kind of like, what the body posture was,” he recalls. Cruise pointed out that while every other character in the room was worried about carrying out their assigned mission–a rollercoaster flight conducted at sweaty-palms speeds–Hangman had to have total confidence in his abilities, and had to be totally unapologetic about that swagger. “He was like, You as a person are very apologetic. You don’t want to hurt people, you want to treat people well, you apologize even when you don’t need to. You can’t have any of that in your eyes.”

But ack, those eyes! Powell has wild-card features. Any one of them, arranged or deployed differently, could have looked nondescript. But his mouth, with its barely there upper lip, and his eyes, with their overhanging lids, somehow come together in a face that can switch instantaneously from jocular to flinty, from sly to severe. He says he used to be concerned about his small eyes, worrying that they disappeared onscreen, but now he thinks they might be his most recognizable feature. (His abs may beg to differ.) “There was an era of actors back in the day who just all had these squinty eyes. It was like the cowboy films—the tough, steely-eyed guys.” He squints and makes his mouth into a thin line, and instantly he does evoke Clint Eastwood, looking critically at the blanched horizon. Then he reanimates back into retriever mode.

Powell is often compared with stratospheric movie stars: Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, George Clooney, and Cruise (“There will never be another Tom Cruise,” he says when I bring this up: Cruise, he says, had a mechanical issue on an F-18 while shooting Maverick. “He and the pilot landed the plane with a wire,” he says. “He smiled, got out of the plane. I was like, That guy almost died, and he’s smiling.”) In recent years, streaming services have overwhelmed Hollywood, throwing more films, shows, and bright young actors at viewers than ever before and shortening the contrails of fame. Meanwhile, Marvel and its ilk have been flinging a parade of chiseled action heroes at audiences for the past decade. Under these conditions, many in Hollywood are asking what a leading man in 2023 is. But even those who can’t confidently define a leading man feel comfortable calling Powell one.

“Character actors—they can be great actors, but you might not follow them everywhere. A leading person. . . it’s just ‘I like them,’ ” says Richard Linklater, who directed Powell in Fast Food Nation (2006) and Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) and who cowrote and produced the indie film Hit Man with him. In Hit Man, which leaped from the festival circuit to Netflix, Powell stars as a nerdy professor who goes undercover as a hit man; this required him to play roles within a role. The challenge of delivering such a layered performance, he explains, is choosing moments to reveal the “real guy.” He had to litter his acting with strategic imperfections. “The audience is still oriented to the fact that this is a performance, and that there are flaws in a performance, always,” he says. “That’s sort of the joy for the audience, is wondering if he’s gonna get caught–wondering if he’s gonna get found out.”

Linklater admires how even when his character’s actions are morally questionable, Powell doesn’t lose his antihero quality. That’s the real test of a leading man, the director says—“you literally let your leading people get away with murder.”

What has been obvious to everyone else has snuck up on Powell, who has only recently started to feel like a star. For the most part, he says, the shift has been subtle, “just like the weather has changed a little bit.” But then there was the time, while he was scrolling on his phone in an airport in Atlanta, that he felt the primal prickle of being watched, and he looked up to see that everyone in the terminal (“the entire terminal,” he says; “it was like a Black Mirror episode”) was filming him on their phones. And at a concert not long ago, he noticed that the man at the urinal next to his was attempting to take a midstream selfie with him.

It was during the frenzied analysis of his photos with Sweeney in Australia, however, that he realized he had entered a new galaxy. “When all that stuff happened, you know, publicly, it felt disorienting and unfair. But what I’m realizing is that’s just a part of this gig now,” he says. The affair (“the alleged affair,” Powell corrects when I allude to it) has become another book in the vast library of fame’s small inconveniences. For now these moments don’t disturb him. He regards them as reminders to focus on what is important and real: namely, his family, his friends, and work that he’s proud of making. Yet in Hollywood, a prophecy is congealing around him. Powell is looking down at his phone, but everyone in the proverbial terminal is watching him.

At a time when the idea of the leading man seems imperiled, many in Hollywood are looking at Powell as the one who might pull the sword from the stone and define the next generation of leading actors. He has earned this attention just by being Glen Powell—pleasant, talented, funny, motivated Glen Powell. (And he is of course in amazing shape: Check out his full weekly training schedule in this exclusive workout story.) These are the prerequisites to leading-manhood, but they’re also the things that Hollywood tends to leech out of its chosen ones. As the adjustments demanded by stardom metastasize from slight shifts in the weather to full-blast tempests, can he hold fast to the qualities that make him so likable?

Powell is entertaining this complex new stratum of his career right as he is entering a complex new stratum of his 30s. He just turned 35, and this, too, has required some adjustments. He has begun to recognize, for example, that certain foods and habits make him feel like shit. He can’t drink beer like he used to. He has also seen the folly in consuming 40-plus ribs in a sitting, which he claims to have done at the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas.

As a small-eyed man, he explains, he has to be careful around ribs. If he eats too many. . . He holds up his fists in front of his face and squeezes them tight, mimicking puffy peepers. “I can eat so much, and I think just for me, on a health level, it’s not necessarily taking the fun out of your life; it’s just riding the brake. Because I can go nuts if I want to.” Today, because he has a photo shoot tomorrow, he is not taking any risks, eye-wise. When the server returns, he orders a hummus platter—he eats the vegetables, I eat the flatbread—and salmon. (Before shooting the beach football scene in Maverick, he tells me, he and his fellow actors ate carefully. After they had shot the scene, spending hours doing push-ups in the sand, frolicking Abercrombie & Fitch-style, and struggling to throw a football with hands slippery from coconut oil, everyone went out and celebrated with beer and tater tots. Later they learned that the camera had actually only been on Cruise all day; they would have to re-tone, re-frolic, and re-shoot.)

Dating is also more fraught for Glen Powell than you might think. The logistics of meeting people are among the “little checkpoints where the world has shifted a few degrees” with his recognizability, he points out after we place our orders. “If you talk to a girl or something like that, and you’re like, We have a really great connection, we’re having a really great interaction, and then they ask you for a selfie, it’s like, Oh. . .”

The logistics of his career can feel like another obstacle to dating. Powell grew up in Austin and has been visiting his family there often, but he is otherwise nomadic, driving between Los Angeles, Austin, and various movie sets in his Chevy Silverado High Country. “I just don’t think drinking the water of any one place for too long is healthy,” he says. (He has been thinking about buying a house in Austin or New York.) He admires Linklater, who primarily roosts in a magical outpost in Texas. But for now Powell prefers to wander the earth, “being a little uncomfortable and not letting roots grow too deep, you know?”

Sitting at Chateau Marmont, Powell looks simultaneously “of L. A.” and not “of L. A.” His polo feels decidedly un-Hollywood; the biceps emerging from it, which are so defined that they look like they’d make a wooden thunk if whacked, are ultra-Hollywood. (Powell began working with Ultimate Performance, which he calls “rip-roaring strength training,” after an ex-girlfriend profiled Kevin McHale, detailing the actor’s post-Glee transformation with the trainers.) When he first moved to California, he recalls, armed with polos and jeans—“basically what I’m wearing now”—he felt some pressure to adopt the actor uniform of the time: tank top, leather jacket, beanie. “After going through all these little identity crises, you slowly circle back to your truest form,” he says with a shrug. He tries not to spend too much time in Hollywood, because he finds that when he’s here he focuses on the fluff around the business rather than his growth as an actor. He explains this via a stream of metaphors: Angelenos are “heat-seeking missiles”; in L.A., “the chorus in your play is too loud.” When he leaves California, and particularly when he’s at home with his family in Austin, he feels that he approaches his work with more purity.

But he acknowledges that his rootlessness could be frustrating for a hypothetical wife and any hypothetical children. At this stage of his career, he says, he might get a call on any given day summoning him to Bulgaria for five months.

“That’s why I became a dog dad,” Powell says. Over the summer, the actor adopted a rescue dog named Brisket, a medley of small breeds (with, Powell qualifies, the soul of a bear) who earned his name from the white lines around his face and along his back, which resemble marbling. While shooting Twisters in Enid, Oklahoma, he saw a photo of Brisket when he had hit his “low of lows”—more likely in Oklahoma than in other places, I’ve found, there being little on the horizon to distract someone from their despair—after the end of his relationship with Gigi Paris. “I needed to put love into something. I saw Brisket’s face and fell in love.” Should he be dispatched overseas for the role of a lifetime, Brisket is more portable, in both size and temperament, than most women. But he would like to meet someone—a human—with patience for his lifestyle.

“I think that’s the thing that has been on my mind the most recently,” he says. Being surreptitiously photographed at the airport is one thing; not having the bandwidth to be a good partner looms larger. “When the sun is shining, you gotta make hay. And you gotta chase this while you got it. And on a romantic level, you gotta find a teammate who is down for that adventure, down for that uncertainty, down for that thing. It’s a lot to deal with. Honestly, I really try to be a great partner. When I love, I love hard. I also understand that the speed and uncertainty of my life is a very hard thing to put up with.”

Once Powell has finished eating, he turns himself perpendicular to the table, sinks a bit in his chair, and stretches out his long legs until he is as close to horizontal as possible while remaining technically upright. He crosses his arms, foregrounding the biceps. Our interview has stretched beyond the allotted hours, and when I ask him whether he needs to leave, he says he may have to go feed his parking meter but makes no move to do so.

He can be, as he puts it, a people pleaser, a personality type that is less tenable now that more people want more from him. “What I’m realizing right now is that you have to give yourself grace for not responding to everybody right away, and not texting everybody back, and not having to be there at every single thing. Because I was known for saying yes to three dinners in a night. I would go to a five o’clock, a seven o’clock, a nine o’clock. I would just try to make everybody happy.”

I wonder if this instinct to not be a dick is what those who extol his “leading-man qualities” are referring to, and I ask Powell about it. “What is a leading man? What is a leading woman? I don’t know—it’s not a thing,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just people who continue to work.”

I’m disappointed in the answer, and when I say so I see Powell begin cleaving for a less cynical response. “When I first moved out to L. A.,” he starts off, then he pauses for a long moment, buffering, and starts again. “When I first moved out to L. A., there was a guy named Ed Limato, who signed me.” The agent had also signed Antonio Banderas, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Matthew McConaughey, Meryl Streep, and Denzel Washington, Powell explains; he had looked up to Limato as a guardian angel until his death in 2010. (At that point the agency dropped Powell and left him, for two years, on his ass.) “Ed told me,” he continues, qualifying that he is almost certainly misremembering the phrasing, “the definition of a movie star is somebody you want to grab a beer with, and when you get too drunk and leave the bar, you can trust him with your wife.”

He’s describing a decency deeper than golden-retriever niceness—a golden retriever is gonna be all over your wife. Powell is friendly, to be sure, but he is also very intelligent and profoundly grounded. (He attributes this to having two sisters who lovingly but constantly check him.) He brings to mind the high school golden boy who easily drifts into the popular crowd but who is somehow immune to their insecurities and competitions. In Linklaterian terms, he’s a Pink (Dazed and Confused): the big man on campus who is still chill, still principled.

“I don’t worry about Glen at all. As far as I can tell, there’s no bad habits there,” says Linklater, laughing. Besides, Powell seems to have a genuine enthusiasm for the work. He’s now an actor, a producer, and a cowriter: Hit Man is an auspicious forerunner for future multihyphenate projects. “You gotta love it enough that you like every part of it,” Linklater adds—and Powell does. “Ben Affleck had a certain quality like that. He just thought big, even as a young man. It was like, ‘Oh, he has a big picture.’ Glen does, too.”

When it’s time to leave the restaurant, it takes a while to exit as Powell navigates a gauntlet of beautiful women. He poses for a photo with a duo at a table nearby, then stops to say goodbye to one of his acquaintances, with fabulous blond waves, and her friend, with fabulous brunette waves and a small white terrier who is fully extended on the chaise next to her, apparently dead. “He’s very old,” the woman says apologetically, as though the dog might otherwise stand to pay his respects. (Is there a more satisfying pairing than a glamorous young woman and a truly decrepit dog?) The terrier senses eyes upon him and lifts his head slightly, revealing a curly Mohawk—bold styling for a geriatric.

After a quick hug during which I, unfortunately, dissociate, Powell hurries away to finally feed his meter. I meander down to street level in a daze, then jolt back to cognizance and race back up to the restaurant. So tipsy on Powell’s charms was I that we had inadvertently dined and dashed at Chateau Marmont. I still don’t feel qualified to diagnose a leading man, but I suspect that’s a symptom.

SPEED ROUND

What you bought with your first major paycheck?
“A sauna.”

Favorite book?
“Devotions, by Mary Oliver.”

Favorite book when you want to sound cool?
“[Laughing] The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand.”

Workout anthem?
“A playlist of random house music Daisy Edgar-Jones gave me.”

Frenemy workout?
“The sled. It kills you. It’s a full-body thing—it prevents you from being the guy who just wants to look good.”

Most exciting phrase in the English language?
“One thing I learned from a costar is to say ‘Here it comes’ right before a take. It’s a sense of anticipation. It’s a sense of ‘Let’s get after it.’ ”

Weirdest fan interaction?
“Signing body parts not appropriate to sign.”

Euphemism for sex?
“Smokin’ the brisket.”

Glen Powell Teams With Richard Linklater For A (Sort Of) True Comedy Noir Thriller Romance That Hits The Target

Written by jen on September 05 2023

Hit Man debuts on Rotten Tomatoes with a perfect score!

Film Review from Venice:

DEADLINE – It was 22 years ago that Skip Hollandsworth wrote a Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a school teacher who moonlights as a hit man who doesn’t kill people. Now if that doesn’t sound like the formula for a hit movie, you may understand why it has taken so long for Gary’s story to make it to the silver screen — so long in fact that its subject passed away before he could hit the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival, where the film is having its world premiere tonight.

Nevertheless, Glen Powell never forgot the story and has teamed with Richard Linklater to finally tell it, though it is only “loosely” based on the original article. Certain details in the screenplay co-written by Linklater and Powell are made up, and those are the details that actually help make this a hilarious winner, as well as perhaps Linklater’s most commercial movie since School of Rock. Its quirky true crime element also has a bit in common with Linklater’s Bernie, which starred Jack Black. The director seems drawn to this kind of offbeat tale, with some level of truth to it.

Powell plays the role of Gary Johnson, who works part-time for the New Orleans Police Department as a fake hit man, a master of disguise who with the unit assigned to him sets up lots of unsuspecting marks by agreeing to kill whatever friend, loved one, relative or other person they want offed. Wired and ready to pounce, Johnson simply gets them to say the magic words about wanting him to commit the murder and voila, they are arrested. The film’s opening half hour has Powell, almost in Peter Sellers mode, disguising himself in different getups to trap various targets who don’t know what they are getting into. In real life, Johnson nailed about 70 people desiring his services to kill on their behalf.

Where the movie takes its own course is when Johnson, using his fake name of Ron, becomes attracted to a beautiful woman named Madison (Adria Arjona), who is trying to hire him to kill her abusive husband. He actually shows some humanity by convincing her it would not be worth the risk to go through with it, much to the disdain of his co-workers in the van listening in and wondering why he let this one get away. That becomes obvious when he begins secretly dating her but under his pseudonym of Ron, now posing as the fake hit man in the pursuit of a new romance, but of course not letting on to his colleagues that he is doing this as it obviously would be unprofessional.

One of those colleagues, Jasper (Austin Amelio), is jealous of Gary as he wants the job and is only his #2. He begins to suspect that something is up, and if he can prove it he knows it will be the end of the line for Gary. It all becomes complicated when Madison’s jerk of a husband Ray (Evan Holtzman) confronts the pair as they are out on a date. Soon and coincidentally, the NOPD team gets a new customer. Guess who? Now it is Gary who has to turn up to take the job offer for a hit on his wife from Ray, who later turns up mysteriously dead. What has happened? Who did it? Suddenly, Hit Man has the elements of a noirish mystery.

Linklater knows just exactly how keep all the balls in the air of this complex story of a hit man who wasn’t a real hit man who just could become a hit man all in the name of love. Billy Wilder would have loved it because it is bordering on Double Indemnity territory. Powell is the perfect fit for this leading role, and clearly he knew it as he also writes and produces with Linklater. He makes all the disguises and changing circumstances seem effortless to navigate. Arjona is a beauty and plays off him nicely with good chemistry between the pair. Amelio is a hoot, the guy who we need to hate here. Retta as Claudette and Sanjay Rao as Phil make up the rest of Gary’s team and they all blend together.

Producers are Mike Blizzard, Linklater, Powell, Jason Bateman and Michael Costigan. The film next heads to the Toronto Film Festival and is a hot market item no doubt. This one is a sleeper and real crowd pleaser.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man Gets Inside the Mind of a Faux Killer for Hire

Written by jen on September 01 2023

Film Productions > 2023 | Hitman > Stills

VANITY FAIR – The director and Glen Powell team up for this noir action-comedy based on a true story about a man with many personas.
Texas Monthly’s October 2001 piece “Hit Man” found an immediate fan in writer-director Richard Linklater, captivated by the story of Gary Johnson, a supposed contract killer in Houston who was actually working with law enforcement. The colorful piece by Skip Hollandsworth portrays a man who was a master of disguises and creating characters in order to convince his clients that he was a cold-blooded killer for hire. “I love this character, but I wasn’t sure of the movie,” Linklater, a Texas native, tells Vanity Fair. “We’ve got a great character, great incidents, great moments, all these great characters, but I didn’t know if it really went anywhere.”

Linklater, who previously adapted another Hollandsworth article into his 2011 black comedy, Bernie, starring Jack Black, loved the strange, funny situations Johnson would find himself in, but he wasn’t ever able to figure out a third act for the story. “I’d had meetings on it over the years and stuff, but it just never really went anywhere,” he says. “It just didn’t cohere as a story.”

Then, during the beginning of the pandemic, his friend and Everybody Wants Some!! star Glen Powell asked him if he’d ever heard of the “Hit Man” story in Texas Monthly. They started spitballing ideas and had their epiphany: The story could go a new, fictional direction based on a small moment toward the end of the article. Finally, they had their third act, and built a genre-bending film that is at times noir, comedy, romance, and thriller. And with a complicated character at the center of it for Powell to dig his teeth into as a leading man, Hit Man also explores deeper themes. “It seemed to be all about identity,” says Linklater of Hit Man, which will debut at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4. “He’s playing these characters, he’s undercover. Who is he?”

“In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script,” Hollandsworth writes in his article. He describes Johnson as a chameleon who is able to shift his characters based on the type of client he’s meeting. The sting was simple: Johnson would meet with a potential client and get the client to verbally confirm they were hiring Johnson to murder someone. Their entire conversation would be recorded, and used as evidence. After Johnson left the meeting, the client would be arrested.

For Powell, who cowrote the script with Linklater, the dark comedy, which is set in New Orleans, was an opportunity to play a character who was often playing a character. Sometimes “there was just a whole blurry line between Gary and Ron, which increased over time,” says Linklater.

In the film, “Ron” is one of Johnson’s personas that he uses when meeting a potential client. He’s Ron when he meets a beautiful woman (Adria Arjona) who wants her controlling husband killed. But Gary feels sympathetic toward her, and advises her to leave him rather than have him killed. From there, Gary—still pretending he’s Ron—is pulled into a complicated ruse when he continues to interact with the woman and their lives get more and more entangled.

Ron, a charismatic, confident man with a dark side, couldn’t be more different than Gary, a mild-mannered teacher in his real life, when he’s not moonlighting as a cold-blooded killer. “Glen, the thorough professional he is, was reading books on body language and he thought Ron would walk a little different than Gary, and he also had a lot of fun with the accents,” says Linklater. “Every movie needs something that’s kind of difficult to pull off or something that seems especially challenging.”

As research, Linklater and Powell listened to the recordings of Johnson’s sting operations, meeting a cast of unbelievable characters who felt almost too strange to be real—and perfect for film. “We could have done a lot more of those,” says Linklater of capturing the wide range of clients hoping to take out a hit. “There’s an alternate movie that’s just all these people at that moment. These rich society ladies, with their nice dresses, sitting down in a nice hotel room talking about how to kill their rich husband they’re sick of.”

Linklater found the conversations fascinating because the clients were having these life-and-death discussions “so matter of factly,” he says. “It’s almost like they’re all acting in their own little crime movie when someone’s suddenly working with a mobster. I thought it was all so dark and funny in the strangest way.”

Linklater was also able to speak with Johnson on the phone while working on the script. For being an undercover hit man, he was surprisingly well-known, attending court proceedings and being featured in news articles. “It was like two different worlds,” explains Linklater. “People that are doing the hits aren’t reading the paper.”

Linklater describes Johnson as “the chillest dude imaginable” who had no issues with his story being told in a film. “He was just the most nonplussed guy,” he says. “We would talk about baseball or something, but he was a man of few words actually.”

When Linklater was about to start filming, he tried to reach out to Johnson again to let him know it was finally happening. But when he couldn’t get in touch with him, he found out from Hollandsworth that he had died.

But Johnson’s story lives on, even as fiction. With Hit Man, Linklater is able to go beyond a quirky framing device to look at how one individual gets lost in the many personalities he takes on, and may be able to change for the better because of it. “How much can we change? Can you change? Are we fixed as people?” says Linklater. “At times, I felt I have changed a lot. No one seems to notice.… But I think that you kind of can change. You can be better. It’s worth trying at least.”

Hit Man will debut at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4 and the Toronto Film Festival on September 11. It is currently seeking US distribution.

Glen Powell Covers Nobleman

Written by jen on July 25 2023

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 037

Order your print copy of the issue for the entire article at the Nobleman Magazine website.

NOBLEMAN – With a sharp grin and a sense of humor as dry as the air in this beautiful Bel Air mansion, Glen Powell enters the room. He is contained, but yet still abounding with life. The Texas-born Powell has been steadily climbing into the screens since 2016. But as of late, he has solidified his stake in our hearts with his role as “Hangman” in Top Gun: Maverick, the resurrection sequel to the iconic 80’s film Top Gun.

Glen Powell showed up to the shoot looking the best out of all of us. “Style is deliberate”, he would later tell us. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. How I dress shows how much I care about it.” This is one of the many glimpses of his humility and thoughtfulness. He shows immense intentionality in all he does. Glen is more than just one thing, he truly is a Renaissance man. He can put on any hat and have you admire how seamless the transition would be.

The beautiful Bel Air estate we found ourselves sharing moments with was a perfect reflection of Powell himself. The subtle and strong mix of modern architecture swirled together with the nostalgic whispers of the past. The hand-in-hand combination of complexity and comfort. You can feel the same way when you meet with Glen, taken back by how he commands a room but also how he makes you feel like the only one in it.

As we sat with him, he held nothing back in his answers. Made thoughtful and authentic quips, and was genuinely excited to be with us like we were a part of the Powell family sitting by a fire at his family’s ranch. Powell tells us behind-the-scenes stories from Top Gun: Maverick, as well as gives a look into what’s coming next for him. All mixed with reminiscing about his family and travels.

How would you define a NOBLEMAN?
Glen Powell: I’ve always been attracted to people that are kind of unapologetically passionate about everything. When they like something, whether it’s traveling, cars, watches, or even sports. If you’re passionate about it, it’s cool. I always find that passionate people are always the most interesting. Their passion usually results in having the most style, and being wise because they’re curious about the world.

Has there been someone in your life that had that passion in a field that helped inspire you to be where you are now?
I instantly think about my parents. They were always supportive and let me be a little lost in life. Growing up, I always had an interest in all sorts of different things. If I wanted to play a sport, or if I wanted to play an instrument, or whatever, they let me follow my passions. I feel like it resulted in becoming good at a lot of different things and knowing a little about a lot. You just become more curious about the world and nothing seems scary. I remember my parents would put me in a room with people who are really accomplished. Just so that I would be able to converse with them.

One of my favorite things my parents did growing up is they would book the beginning of a trip and the end of a trip, and everything in the middle was an adventure. Our vacations were all about discovering new places and cuisines. It was all about chasing whatever you wanted to chase. You wouldn’t get locked into an itinerary, like during the trip you would actually find what was the most interesting thing to you throughout that trip and it made the world so much more exciting. You were getting dragged around by your parents in some random city. But you were empowered to chase it rather than just experience it.

It’s good to keep it a little loose. It did feel a little crazy sometimes, sleeping in cars or a barn, but some of those times are the parts of the trip that you remember the most. Leaving room for adventure is important.

Give me a snapshot of your career, what have the last twenty years looked like?
It’s been a wild adventure, to say the least. I mean this whole thing has been something I desired since I was ten years old. I did like the sound of music when I was like, I dunno, thirteen years old. My parents showed up for every single performance. It was like 30 performances of that. They didn’t miss a single one. It’s been so cool bringing my parents to film sets and having them be a part of the journey. It’s a really special time in life.

Also, the fact that I’m getting to act alongside some of my heroes and be a part of movies that I adored growing up, is just beyond words. For example, I’m getting to make Twister right now, which was one of my favorite movies growing up. It’s just so surreal. Or even with Top Gun: Maverick, I almost didn’t do it. But it has changed my life in every way. So it’s hard to imagine what life would be like if I had turned this roll down like I originally did.