Feature: Glen Powell Gets Ready with GQ!

Glen Powell is still catching his breath when he comes to the phone Sunday, just hours before he’ll hit the red carpet at the Golden Globes. He’s nominated for the first time in the Lead Actor category for Hit Man, a movie he co-wrote and another piece of evidence that Powell knows more about refreshing the rom-com genre than 99% of Hollywood. I wonder if nerves are setting in before the big night, causing the minor panting, but he assures me he’s feeling pretty chill about the whole thing. The cause of the shortness of breath is that even though it’s still only Sunday morning in Los Angeles, Powell and his family have already started getting ready for the night in true action-hero style. Just three minutes before our call, Powell says, he emerged from the plunge pool with his sister after a session in the sauna. They were at the gym before that, and the whole Powell family already ran hills together, too. “I was like, shivering at the beginning of the call,” he relays in his friendly Texan-twinged accent.

Powell knows the most important parts of looking great in a tuxedo are done outside the stylist’s quarters and hair-and-makeup chair. Actually, the process of getting into the tuxedo and onto the red carpet starts many years earlier. Powell began writing Hit Man at the start of the pandemic. He realized it was a moment “you either downshift or you throttle up, and I decided to throttle up,” Powell says. When the actor found a decades-old Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, the police investigator he would base the story around, he started crafting the script while everyone else was learning to knead sourdough.

His initiative paid off; Hit Man eventually became Powell’s second collaboration with Richard Linklater (who cowrote and directed) and earned him a Best Actor nomination at the Globes. It’s a neat summation of his time in Hollywood. It’s clear he and his action-chasing Twisters character have more in common than a love for cowboy hats. “This town [Los Angeles] was never going to give me anything,” he says. “I was very frustrated immediately and realized, ‘Okay, I can’t wait for the phone to ring I’m going to have to either pick it up and dial myself, or I’m just going to have to create this thing myself.’ I didn’t wait for things to happen, I always woke up and made them happen.” [More at Source]

written by Mouza on January 20, 2025 under

Photos: Glen Powell attends the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards

Glen attended the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony with his parents in Los Angeles, California last week.

written by Mouza on January 20, 2025 under

Feature: Glen Powell for The Hollywood Issue 2024

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. [More at Source]

written by Mouza on January 20, 2025 under

Feature: Glen Powell for Sharp Magazine

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. [More at Source]

written by Mouza on January 20, 2025 under

Feature: Glen Powell for The Washington Post

Glen Powell gestures to the asphalt where his dreams were almost crushed. He was 13 years old, playing pickup basketball on this very portion of the Austin Studios lot with fellow child actors from the third Spy Kids movie, when he accidentally knocked one of his co-stars to the ground. They were taking a break from filming the popular children’s franchise, on which Powell, whose character is simply referred to in the credits as “long-fingered boy,” was only working for the day. This was his first acting gig. Would he ever be allowed on a film set again?

The other kid was fine. So, it turned out, was Powell. As he relays this memory on a May afternoon, it seems ludicrous he ever worried about such a mishap derailing his acting career. But Powell has always been farsighted. He knows that what you do in the present can determine your future. This apparently manifested as anxiety during his childhood. As an adult, it became business acumen.

Which might help explain why Powell, 35, seems to be everywhere this year. He appears on the covers of glossy magazines. He sneaks into all your social media feeds. He shows up on daytime talk shows, where he tells Gayle King that he isn’t chasing love but will accept it if it “hits me in the face.”

Not only has Powell gained credibility among critics by becoming a regular weapon in Richard Linklater’s arsenal — most recently in the action-comedy “Hit Man,” which the actor co-wrote — but he might also be on the verge of reliable blockbuster stardom. After an attention-grabbing supporting role in the massively successful “Top Gun: Maverick,” Powell stars in the disaster film “Twisters” (opening Friday), Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 smash hit featuring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

Paxton, admired for grounding big-budget productions with palpable humanity, is a hard act to follow. Skeptics raise an eyebrow at Powell, who has been described as the next Matthew McConaughey because of his wide grin, chiseled look and Texan geniality. He is already set to expand his résumé with a diverse slate of film and television projects — plus a potential Broadway musical — and keeps a notebook full of advice from the likes of Tom Cruise. But does that translate to trajectory? Is Powell the next McConaughey or Cruise? Could he become a Paul Newman or a Robert Redford, earning artistic respect on par with his jawline and smile wattage? [More at Source]

written by Mouza on July 20, 2024 under

Video: Glen Powell vs. Daisy Edgar-Jones in Hot Ones Versus

written by Mouza on July 20, 2024 under

Video: “Twisters” for Vanity Fair

written by Mouza on July 20, 2024 under

Video: Glen Powell on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

written by Mouza on July 20, 2024 under

Video: Glen Powell on Late Night with Seth Meyers

written by Mouza on July 20, 2024 under

Video: “TWISTERS” Official Trailer

written by Mouza on April 08, 2024 under
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