Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 043

Read the full article at the British GQ website:

For years, Glen Powell was an also-ran for every blockbuster going. Now, riding the mega-success of Anyone But You, and leading two of this summer’s biggest movies, he’s learning to enjoy everything he’d been missing out on
Glen Powell is the perfect person to take you on a tour of the Warner Bros’ backlot. I say this with apologies to Tom, our heavily experienced actual tour guide, who on this particular sunny day in Burbank, California, is attempting to add to Powell’s running commentary by directing our attention to a chandelier from Casablanca, or a jukebox once used by Elvis. Glen Powell is the perfect tour guide because the Warner Bros’ backlot – once home to the likes of the Animaniacs, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Big Bang Theory – is inherently uncool. It’s the kitschy zenith of Hollywood tourism, the LA version of pulling on a Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt in the queue for Madame Tussauds. And Glen Powell has no interest in pretending to be cool.

Don’t believe the movies – at least not the ones where he plays hot egotistical finance bros, or blows people up in fighter jets. Glen Powell is a massive film nerd. “Anybody who knows me knows I’m obsessed with this,” he’ll say, and go on to prove that a thousand times today, as you walk through the sprawling complex of gigantic beige hangars, bumping into random vignettes from film history. He’ll ask you to take a picture with him on the Central Perk sofa from the actual set of Friends. He’ll say, “Oh, this is cool!” and the cool thing will be a miniature aeroplane that was made to look like a bigger aeroplane in The Right Stuff. “My first school project in second grade was on Steven Spielberg’s use of practical effects,” he’ll say as an aside, seriously. He’ll tell you about the Saturday Night Live: The Best Of DVDs he used to rinse as a kid, and that his mum says he used watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes of movies more than the movies themselves.

Then his attention will be grabbed by something else: a large table and chair next to a small table and chair, and he’ll ask you to join him in demonstrating forced perspective, the camera trickery Peter Jackson used to make Ian McKellen look huge and Elijah Wood look hobbitish in The Lord of the Rings, and when you move for the smaller seat, he’ll say, “No man, you should be the giant.”

Glen Powell is the best person to lead this tour because this place was a major setting in his former life, the one before he became a movie star, where he nearly ground himself to dust trying to make it in the industry he cares deeply about. (Perhaps too deeply, he wonders at times.) “Look!” He’ll say. There’s the fake New York street where he played Brett Farnsworth in a one-episode arc of Without A Trace in 2008. Look! There’s the fake front stoop from Full House where the real John Stamos gave him a fatherly speech during a drawn-out breakup. The anecdotes will come thick and fast, and you’ll be surprised that someone has lived so much real life in a make-believe place.

“Wait – is that James Gunn’s office?” Powell says.

The (newly-revamped) Superman insignia is calling out to him like a beacon at the end of a long alleyway. Tom casts some doubt, but Powell is convinced. A knock; no one is home. We linger in the reception area, in the glow of the sign, for just a moment. Now that every door in town seems to be opening for Powell, it feels surprising to find one that, at least for now, remains shut.

“I was always a Batman guy,” Powell tells me later, as we walk through a hall lined with Batmobiles. Powell has no interest in playing a superhero, but flirts with the idea of Bruce Wayne (who anyway, is just a man). “I would have a wild take on Batman. It definitely would not be like a Matt Reeves tone – it’d probably be closer to Keaton. Oh, sick!” He has found Keaton’s Batmobile. “See? This is the era.”

Although he hasn’t played Batman, he has been pretty close. “I get my head smashed in by Bane in The Dark Knight Rises,” he says, proudly. Powell moved to LA from his hometown of Austin, Texas, in 2008, but struggled to find his footing as a young actor. He went through various agents, at one point repping himself. “When you have no one championing you, you feel like you’re adrift.” He would wake up every day and look at casting breakdowns, film unsolicited auditions, find out casting directors’ contact information and get a friend of his who worked in sales to call them on his behalf. “I was like, this town’s gonna kick me out regardless. You might as well kick down every door you possibly can,” he says, as we amble back out onto the lot.

“Glen?!”

Pam Abdy, the co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros’ Motion Picture Group – who is, by the way, in the middle of an interview with the BBC – has spotted the leading man of her big summer blockbuster. “Twisters was so much fun, we had a blast,” she says, pulling him into a familiar embrace.

Powell is a superhero around here nowadays. In the past three years, he’s carved himself out as one of the few leading actors who can reliably juice up the box office. Forgetting Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played the cocky antagonist Hangman, his value in the eyes of Hollywood decision-makers is higher than ever thanks to a movie that virtually no one predicted would become so big: Anyone But You, the Shakespeare-inspired romcom in which he starred alongside Sydney Sweeney, which has pulled in a staggering $218 million since its release. Powell has just co-written and starred in Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater, which was so warmly received on the festival circuit last year that Netflix coughed up $20 million for it in September. This summer he’s the lead in Twisters, a throwback sequel to the 1990s action film Twister, which looks set to revive another worn-out genre: the climate-panic blockbuster.

And then there are all the maybes and probablies in the works. He missed out on what would become Josh Hartnett’s role in Oppenheimer by a slim margin, he says, but he’s still in touch with Christopher Nolan, and has faith that they’ll get to do something together soon. He’s co-creating a Captain Planet TV series that Leonardo DiCaprio is producing. Unrelatedly, he’s off for a casual meeting with British filmmaker Edgar Wright after this. To steal the title of one of his first major films: everybody wants some Glen Powell.