Long before Glen Powell became one of Hollywood's most reliable leading men, he was an unknown actor looking for a break. In his twenties, he wrote to Sylvester Stallone while Stallone was casting The Expendables 3. At the time, Powell was, in his own words, “on the brink of starvation.” He told Stallone he had grown up in Texas with a shooting range on the family ranch, that he had learned to fight with his uncles, and that he had spent large parts of his childhood trying to find new ways to cheat death.

The letter worked. Powell got the part. And, in a twist that felt like a movie, almost everything in the letter was true. “I wouldn’t say I was constantly trying to cheat death,” Powell later admitted, but he did grow up with guns around. There was a shooting range in the family compound. He and his cousins staged plays, and the first one they created was a version of James Bond that required seven different Bonds. His mother, Cyndy, remembers a household where skills mattered. Every summer, Powell learned something new: changing a tire, driving a tractor, breaking a horse.

Key facts

• Glen Powell will star in Chad Powers, a Disney+ comedy series premiering this autumn, and Running Man, Edgar Wright’s big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novel.
• He landed an early career role in The Expendables 3 by writing a letter to Sylvester Stallone.
• His breakthrough credits include Everybody Wants Some!!, Hidden Figures, Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, Anyone But You, and Twisters.
• Powell performs most of his own stunts in Running Man and says he trained like a high-level athlete to embody the character.

Powell has transformed old-fashioned masculine competence into a leading-man career. This autumn he appears in two very different projects. In Chad Powers, he plays a disgraced quarterback who uses prosthetics and a ridiculous accent to reinvent himself as a college player. In Running Man, he plays Ben Richards, a man chased by killers while cameras broadcast the violence as entertainment. Both roles require an intense physical presence, a natural athleticism that is often simulated in Hollywood but visible when it is real.

On screen and in person, Powell radiates an overflowing energy. He is the kind of guy who might help you change a flat tire but could also knock you out in two seconds if he wanted to. “For me, Hollywood is like a soccer field where kids run after the ball,” he says. Until recently, he stayed on the bench.

When he was starting out, Hollywood was deep in the Twilight era. Powell remembers that Robert Pattinson was the model to follow, and the standard leading man was pale, slender, and tormented. Powell, with a quarterback’s frame, chose a different route. He aligned himself with performers like Tom Cruise, his Top Gun: Maverick co-star, who became a friend and mentor.

A decade ago, Powell felt the tide turn. In Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), he played a college baseball player with outsized dreams. He followed with Hidden Figures, in which he played astronaut John Glenn. Then came Set It Up, a Netflix romantic comedy where he played an overworked assistant. The roles that made him a star often had a common thread: arrogant, overly confident men who liked to stay in a position of power. Powell learned that the image the industry wanted from him was different from the one he had imagined. “That’s what’s funny about Hollywood. You don’t really have a choice,” he says. “I gradually realized people liked seeing me play arrogant and self-assured characters.”

He tells a story about Billy, one of his famous uncles. One day, a man tried to hit Billy’s younger brother. Billy told him to stop. When the man hit him anyway, Billy grabbed him and beat him, shouting “Why are you making me do this?” the whole time, then burst into tears. Powell loves those moments of rupture, where a confident man sees his confidence crack. “I’m fascinated by the malleability of human beings, our ability to change, our capacity to improve.”

For Powell, the aftermath of conflict is more interesting than the fight. “That’s where vulnerability becomes a great sign of masculinity,” he says. “Not pretending nothing hurts, and not trying to make people believe the road was smooth.”

Recently, Powell spent a lot of time in Scotland. Running Man was shot partly in Glasgow, and he is also starting production on a secret J.J. Abrams film there. He has reached a level of fame that feels new. He takes selfies, and even the veterinarian he saw in the middle of the night knows his dog’s name, Brisket. During a walk through Glasgow, he showed the streets where Running Man had captured shots, then stopped at the Grosvenor Picture Theatre, one of the city’s oldest cinemas.

Powell loves movie theaters. He tells a story about Jerry Bruckheimer, the legendary producer he met on Top Gun: Maverick. Bruckheimer has a private cinema in the basement of his house, with portraits and autographs of everyone he has worked with. There is the helmet from Armageddon, props from Bad Boys, the green explosive beads from The Rock. “I’m going to have to make a lot more movies to afford something like that,” Powell jokes.

In a dark, empty theater, Powell remembers coming to Glasgow with Richard Linklater to promote Everybody Wants Some!!. Linklater, who has a gift for discovering Texas talents, had written a difficult role to cast. “I needed someone charismatic, intelligent, and credible as a college athlete,” Linklater recalls. Powell looked like a beatnik and was reading Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. In other words, he was perfect. Powell loved the character’s philosophy: “The poetry he finds in every small thing, the life lessons, the group he founded... I thought I’d like to be more like him in real life.”

Powell has told the story many times. After appearing in The Great Debaters, Denzel Washington introduced him to Ed Limato, a legendary agent who had discovered Richard Gere and Michelle Pfeiffer. Limato encouraged him to move to Los Angeles. Three years later, Limato died, leaving Powell alone in a strange city. Hollywood is cruel to young actors. “I think it’s crucial, when you take a punch in the face, to take stock and assess the situation so you can defend yourself next time.”

Powell contacted Edgar Wright directly about starring in Running Man. “Actors rarely do that,” Wright says. “Glen sent me a text saying, ‘I don’t know if this is true, but I heard my name was mentioned for Running Man.’ He added, ‘If I ever get the chance to work with you, I promise I’ll work harder than any actor you’ve ever worked with.’ The worst part is, he wasn’t lying.” Josh Brolin, his co-star, says Powell’s intensity sometimes seemed unsettling. “He wants to prove to himself and to others that he doesn’t take anything lightly.”

In a Hollywood increasingly dependent on digital doubles, Powell did most of his own stunts in Running Man. In Stephen King’s novel, Ben Richards is described as a colossus, so Powell trained to become one. “I sweated like crazy. I gained a lot of muscle,” he says. “I went from actor to high-level athlete.” The desire to do his own stunts is also a statement about the industry. “When people say cinema is dead, it drives me crazy,” he says. “What I’m trying to do now, as an actor, producer, and writer, is create prototypes that can seduce the public and suddenly restore confidence in the whole industry.”

He learned that lesson from the unexpected success of Anyone But You in 2023. “Some of my best memories in theaters are linked to romantic comedies. Those films make us feel better. The genre had been snubbed by the big screen and only existed on streaming. It was incomprehensible. Jerry Bruckheimer told me everyone believed pirate movies were dead before he made the first Pirates of the Caribbean. So when someone tells me a genre is dead, I see it as an opportunity.”

Anyone But You also brought Powell his first real experience of celebrity, partly because the public read an off-screen romance into his chemistry with Sydney Sweeney. Neither the production nor the stars tried to clarify the speculation. Powell’s girlfriend at the time, Gigi Paris, later said she was asked not to visit the set. Powell is careful in response: “I will only ever have love and respect for Gigi. Everyone has their own version of things, and she has the right to tell hers. When two people separate, they each go their own way and tell their own story.”

For years, Powell auditioned relentlessly and also wrote scripts. He even sold a few, including Hit Man, co-written with Richard Linklater. The film, about a New Orleans police officer who poses as a contract killer, became a reflection of Powell himself. “It was a strange exploration of my subconscious. The film asks: how do we become the best version of ourselves? Who made us that ‘best version’? Those questions obsess me.” In autumn 2023, he and Linklater sold Hit Man to Netflix for an estimated $20 million. Anyone But You grossed $220 million worldwide. By summer 2024, Twisters had become another hit. Powell

Source: GQ France News