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

Calum Marsh August 26, 2024

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.”

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and this is the first time where I can definitely feel a shift,”

Glen Powell

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.”

“Any time you can pay the bills and survive on acting, it’s a miracle. I am hyper aware of that. You never forget how people treated you. It’s why I feel this insane sense of gratitude right now. I don’t take any of this for granted — at all.”

Glen Powell

It was a lot for the young man to take in. The people he’d seen go down this path before him, he said, “came back to Texas very different than they left, and the light in their eyes was gone.” It was a fate that Powell didn’t want for himself. “I think I’ve always been a very practical person. So many people move out there with dreams and ambitions. I go into things knowing the odds.”

That night at the Cinerama was a crossroads. “I remember thinking, ‘I have a really good life in Texas. I have a great family and great friends. How much do I love this thing, and how much am I willing to bet on myself?”

The mentorship of Washington and the encouragement of Ed Limato proved compelling enough for Powell to leave home and make a go of L.A., but he likes to say that he went in with a sense of blistering realism. “I’m not a crazy person who went there being like, ‘I’m going to take on this town!’ ” he says, laughing. “I went in there being like, ‘I’m going to get hit in the face. A lot.’”

Those early years were not encouraging. Powell paid the bills — just barely — by appearing in commercials and landing the occasional part on network procedurals. When Powell got a one-off part in an episode of The Lying Game, the teen drama on ABC Family, he was flooded with relief. “I was having a really hard time,” he recalls. Getting on a show like that — no one’s idea of a prestigious job — was nonetheless “a validation that you have some semblance of talent and something to offer.”

It’s the kind of minuscule windfall that can make the whole thing worthwhile. “It’s just a miracle. Any time you can pay the bills and survive on acting, it’s a miracle. I am hyper aware of that. You never forget how people treated you. It’s why I feel this insane sense of gratitude right now. I don’t take any of this for granted — at all.”

Powell has been thinking about this a lot during the press tour for Twisters, which has just wrapped the night before. Twisters is the kind of big, bold action thriller that Powell has always wanted to be a part of: he remembers reading the script for the first time and thinking, “I can’t wait to see this, whether I’m in it or not.” But promoting the movie alongside his family, he found himself reflecting on the old days. “They knew what it was like for me all those years. It was really tough. You don’t forget that feeling.”

Things started to pick up a bit for Powell in 2014, when he was cast in The Expendables 3. It was the letter that Powell wrote to the director and star Sylvester Stallone that helped land him the part. “I knew Stallone’s reputation,” Powell says. “He’s a hustler. He’s a go-getter.” At the time, Powell was “barely scraping by,” hardly even able to feed himself, and he wanted “to let this guy who hustled and really put his own sweat in [know] that I was willing to do anything to give him one hell of a performance.” It worked; he got the part, and some advice to boot.

Stallone encouraged Powell to be himself and lean into being Texan — something that Powell had spent the past several years desperately attempting to hide. “When I first moved to L.A., I had representation at the time that told me to lean away from it,” he said. “I literally showed up to an agency wearing a cowboy hat, and they were like, ‘Dude, are you straight off a farm? What’s going on here?’ ” When an actor first comes to L.A., Powell explains, there’s “a bit of an identity crisis,” because “people tell you what you should be and how you should do it.” He remembers “wearing the fedora and the skinny jeans” and wondering what he was doing with his life, but it wasn’t until Stallone gave him permission that he was able “to get back to what feels like you.”

Needless to say, Stallone was right. Powell’s Texan roots soon became his identity on and off the screen, and he learned that when done right, “people will respond to who you genuinely are.” And Texas opened up the door for what would become a milestone movie in Powell’s career: Everybody Wants Some!!, the director Richard Linklater’s supremely likeable slacker comedy and “spiritual successor” to Dazed and Confused, in which Powell co-stars as the effortlessly scene-stealing Walt “Finn” Finnegan.

“The thing that I’m trying to do is build trust with the audience that I’m going to work my butt off to make sure they’re entertained. That way, when they show up and pay their $15 for a ticket, they’ll at least be able to say, ‘I know that this dude is going to try to deliver quality. He’s going to summon every bit of himself to try to deliver quality.’”

Glen Powell

Powell and Linklater — who had worked together once before on Fast Food Nation — were now developing a fruitful creative partnership. They were often on the lookout for ways that they could collaborate, which is how they came to discuss a 2001 article by Skip Hollandsworth about a part-time police contractor in New Orleans who develops a knack for playing the part of an assassin for hire. “Brad Pitt had optioned that article, and other people had tried to make it into a movie, but no one had been able to crack it,” Powell says. “But there was a line in there about the guy meeting a woman who is trying to kill her husband, and he goes out with her still in the role, and I thought to myself, ‘That’s the great lie at the centre of this story.’”

That story became Hit Man, the irrepressibly delightful comedy that Powell co-wrote with Linklater, who directs the hell out of it. Powell’s performance, already being tipped for Oscar nominations, is a tour de force. He plays Gary Johnson, the philosophy professor turned part-time faux-assassin, who has an easier time examining life than actually living it. To pull off his sting operations, he crafts characters that are tailored for each suspect, from a ruthless Patrick Bateman-esque killer to a mustachioed Russian macho man. The accent work and costuming are technically dazzling, but what’s truly impressive is how Powell makes Gary visible underneath it all.

“The audience needs to see the baseline of Gary,” he explains. “It’s not The Nutty Professor. I’m not a guy with multiple personalities. This is a guy who is teaching about humanity and not participating in it, and he’s trying on different masks.” But while Hit Man allows Powell to show off his range, it also demonstrates his most abundant natural talent: charm. His chemistry with Adria Arjona is off the charts, imbuing the dark comedy with a full-bodied sexiness that’s rare in modern movies. Their rapport is one of the film’s best assets.

Of course, anyone who saw Powell earlier this year in Anyone But You won’t be surprised. His chemistry with co-star Sydney Sweeney was the cornerstone of the film’s praise. Anyone But You was received not simply as a fine romantic comedy but, indeed, as maybe the first real romantic comedy in recent memory. For proof that Powell is a bona fide star, look no further than this movie, which takes a somewhat banal screenplay and supercharges it with marquee charisma.

Powell says that making Anyone But You a capital-R romcom was “incredibly deliberate,” and that it was always part of the plan for the film to feel like a proper event. And while Powell says that he, Sweeney, and director Will Gluck always believed in it, “the business at large was skeptical of what that movie was and where it could go,” he says.

“I think we were all confident that when a genre is being ignored, it just means you haven’t made a really good one in a while. It doesn’t mean the genre is poisonous. It doesn’t mean that audiences don’t want it.” Are romcoms over? Clearly not. “The genre isn’t dead — you just stopped caring!”

If Powell has one good quality, he says, “it’s definitely caring.” It’s true that there’s a level of care — of effort — in Powell’s movies that isn’t always consistent across Hollywood. Similar to Denzel Washington, Powell brings a certain baseline professionalism and intensity to his movies that raise a project’s floor.

That’s all part of the plan. “The thing that I’m trying to do is build trust with the audience that I’m going to work my butt off to make sure they’re entertained,” Powell says. “That way, when they show up and pay their $15 for a ticket, they’ll at least be able to say, ‘I know that this dude is going to try to deliver quality. He’s going to summon every bit of himself to try to deliver quality.’”