Glen Powell on Hit Man, Tom Cruise, Texas Move, Sydney Sweeney

Glen Powell was photographed on March 26 at the Harvard House Motel in Los Angeles.
Alison Edmond, artistic and fashion director.
Brunello Cucinelli jacket and pants;
vintage polo shirts; Tom Ford sunglasses; David Yurman ring.

Photographed by GUY AROCH; Artistic and fashion director ALISON EDMOND; Grooming: Christine Nelli at Forward Artists.

Glen Powell arrives at lunch through a back door with a container of bone broth that he doesn’t want to look at, much less consume. He’s more of a chicken-fried-steak-in-Austin type, he insists, but he’s signed on to star in an A24 revenge thriller and he’s supposed to lose 15 pounds in a few weeks. That means he won’t order the lunchtime margarita that Ron Perlman is making at the next table. Reluctantly, Powell asks for a green juice.

“I almost gave up on this diet three times,” he says with a familiar smile. “I’m like, ‘Can’t we just change the character?’ »

But Powell isn’t one to give up on anything, so he strains the broth. The restaurant will stock it for him, he tells me, since he no longer has a kitchen in Los Angeles. After more than 15 years here, he is returning home to Texas, where he will finally finish college and be closer to his family. He’ll also keep a spot in Tribeca, but he’s officially handed over the keys to his place in the Hollywood Hills he’s been living in since landing his role in Top Gun: Maverick. In fact, it’s Powell’s last week in Los Angeles, which hits him harder than expected. Still, at 35, he’s ready for a change, and the real benefit “of getting to this point in Hollywood is that I can now leave Hollywood,” he says. “It’s like I’ve won the opportunity to return to my family.”

Much to my surprise, and frankly his, this is a completely new development — despite all the media attention surrounding the issue. Top GunPowell’s career hasn’t fundamentally changed in 2022. Instead, it’s the runaway success of his recent Sydney Sweeney romantic comedy, Anyone but you, who proved to studio bosses that he not only had the charisma of a leading man, but also the increasingly rare ability to open a film. In the months since his $200 million-plus box office haul, Powell, more reminiscent of his passionate American predecessors than some of his more retarded contemporaries, has seen his industry stock soar. These same executives who didn’t want to get up for his festival, darling Hitman — which opens May 24 and then streams on Netflix two weeks later — are now wooing him with tentpole deals and blockbuster salaries. “He’s the complete package,” enthuses Universal Pictures chairman Peter Cramer, who put him in the studio’s big summer bet, Twistsreleased mid-July.

But Powell isn’t interested in just becoming another actor for hire, nor is he interested in waiting to become the next Tom Cruise. “First of all, there will never be another Tom Cruise,” he says of his co-star, who became a friend and mentor. “It’s a singular career in a singular moment, but also the movie stars of the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, those will never be recreated.”

When it is suggested that the imperiled state of the movie star in today’s superhero-obsessed Wall Street landscape is a shame, in part because it seems like Powell might have had a hell of a time, he yells in agreement. “Oh, I heard the guys’ stories about Consumables 3” he says, referring to the 2014 film he made with the who’s who of ’80s action stars. “It was these giants — Antonio Banderas, Harrison Ford, Schwarzenegger — and they were all like, ‘ Man, you’re doing this at the wrong time.’ Like, ‘Now’s not the time.'” Richard Linklater, who directed Powell in. Hitman, which they co-wrote, is not discussed. “I can’t tell you, ‘My advice is to be born 25 years early,’” Linklater says, “but that’s what I thought about Glen. Like, my God, you’re in the wrong era.

So Powell is trying to do Hollywood in a different way, involving himself in every facet of the process – always as a star, often as a producer and increasingly as a writer. And soon he’ll be operating at a healthy physical distance, free from the increasing “aquarium feeling” he describes as camera phones point more and more in his direction and everyone here seems to be waiting for something him. “What makes me feel conflicted about parts of this moment is that I like to choose when I’m in front. And I’m more than happy to do a press tour. I love it. I love going on a Jimmy Fallon – you go out, you sign autographs, you do everything,” he says. What does he find uncomfortable? “This idea that you are a function here. Someone will say, “Hey, buddy, do you want to come over to this guy’s house?” Yeah, come on. And then you show up, and all of a sudden you’re there for someone’s tequila launch and all of a sudden there’s a photographer and you’re like, “Wait, what- what are we doing here? And I think you have enough of that to just want to bring your family as close as possible – or run to them.

Powell was voted most likely to be a movie star in his high school yearbook, but his introduction to Hollywood came years earlier. At 13, the then budding actor landed a small role in Spy on the kids 3, a local production directed by fellow Texan Robert Rodriguez. It was, by all accounts, an out-of-body experience for a boy walking around with a video camera constantly hanging from his neck. Yet this was Powell’s second experience: being chosen for Endurance 2A Survivorstyle competition series on Discovery Kids – which arguably proved more transformative.

“Glen from Austin, Texas,” is how an earnest, still-prepubescent Powell is identified in the premiere, fails the first physical challenge, and is launched into the first episode. Even the story makes him wince. “I mean, it’s the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a freshman in high school.” Not only are you the least in the category, but you just failed in a performance of strength in front of the whole world, and the amount of shit I got was extraordinary,” Powell said. However, he did not let himself sink. Even as a kid, he remembers thinking, “I’ll show them,” and he quickly bulked up, giving him both a boost of confidence and an athletic edge. “It made me fierce, like, ‘I’m going to be the strongest motherfucker ever,’ and weirdly more involved in every aspect of my life.”

While he was still in high school, his mother, who formerly worked in the Reagan administration, drove him to Shreveport, Louisiana, to audition for the 2007 Denzel Washington film, The great debaters. Overeager, Powell wore a tuxedo during the first table read, where he knew his lines and those of almost everyone else. Washington was impressed enough to hire him as a debater at Harvard and later introduce him to his agent, Ed Limato. At the time, Powell had no idea who Limato was, much less that he had replaced everyone from Mel Gibson to Richard Gere. But he was so touched by the nice things he’d heard Limato say, including that Powell reminded him of a cross between William Hurt and a young Gere, that he wrote him a thank you note after filming was over and he had settled down. in his first year at the University of Texas. Then one day, when Powell was back in the dorms, Limato called. He hoped Powell would come to Los Angeles for the premiere. He wanted to meet and discuss his future.

“I’ll never forget it. I sat down with him and Denzel, and it was quick. Ed said, ‘You should move here and try.’ He said, ‘This shit doesn’t happen overnight, but you should take the plunge,’” he says of a conversation he replays over and over in his head Washington, who has since joked that Powell owes him his career, gave his blessing. said, “This guy found out about everyone; don’t run from this, Glen.”

So he finished his junior year and headed west, moving in with a family he knew through an uncle in Texas. In exchange for driving around their son and coaching his sports teams, Powell stayed at their sprawling Holmby Hills estate for free. In the meantime, he was taking part in auditions, this time as Limato’s official client. To this day, Powell keeps an old screenshot of Limato’s IMDb listing. “They were the most legendary actors, like numbers two, five, six and eight on the star meter,” he says. “And then there was me, at about 68,000 or whatever, probably lower.” (If you’re wondering, Powell is now No. 15.) But very little was learned from that period. Hollywood was in its Dusk era, and he regularly found himself confronted by sullen, nervous guys wearing hats, chains and leather jackets. In his polo shirts and boots, Powell never really fit in. “And I just felt like I was letting Ed down,” he said.

In time, the Holmby Hills couple decided to divorce, and Powell moved into someone’s garage in a seedy Van Nuys neighborhood. “It was all these cliché things where, like, they find a body a block away and then you come home with your tires flat,” he says. Yet he continued, auditioning relentlessly. He even had another chance Friday night lightswhich he had read several times at the beginning…