It has become trite to 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.” [More at Source]