There isn’t much of a reason to remember the 2012 romantic comedy Stuck in Love – an independent production that, despite the presence of big-name actors including Jennifer Connelly and Greg Kinnear, grossed less than a million dollars worldwide.
There’s even less of a reason to remember Glen Powell in it, unless you were specifically on the lookout for his square jaw and sandy hair: then just 23 years old, the jobbing Texan actor played a minor role in the ensemble, billed in the credits merely as “Good-Looking Frat Guy”.
For a time it seemed that casting might just be the story of Powell’s career. Blond and green-eyed without looking startlingly Aryan, tall and buff but not cartoonishly jacked, he’s handsome in such an archetypically all-American way that he once seemed at risk of being forever backgrounded. He was as perfect playing a cocky college jock – in Richard Linklater’s rowdy 2016 comedy Everybody Wants Some!! – as he was playing midcentury astronaut John Glenn, a near-emblem of clean-cut white American masculinity, in 2016’s Hidden Figures. If there’s nobody in the business who looks quite like Timothée Chalamet or, at the opposite end of the physical scale, like Jason Momoa, Glen Powell looks a little like a lot of people – as if a studio executive composed a movie-star identikit from portions of Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
That’s not the knock it might appear to be: Powell radiates such classical, even quintessential, Hollywood star quality, it’s a surprise it’s taken him this long to ascend to the top of the A-list. But ascend he has. In the space of just a couple of films, vaulted in particular by his supporting turn opposite Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, Powell has been promoted from Frat Guy to That Guy – a leading man equally comfortable as a heartthrob, a goofball comedian or an everyman action hero.
Powell looks a little like a lot of people—as if a studio executive composed a movie-star identikit from portions of Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt, and Tom Cruise.
This year, he’s felt ubiquitous. Anyone but You, a featherweight romantic comedy with fellow It star Sydney Sweeney, stayed in cinemas for months on the strength of their fizzy chemistry, its $220m gross exceeding all industry expectations for a genre often consigned to streaming these days. Speaking of streaming, Netflix had a home-viewing sensation in the spring with Hit Man, a bouncy crime farce that Powell co-wrote with Linklater and that hinges on his casual southern charm.
The big test came last weekend when Twisters, an effects-heavy disaster movie (and long-belated sequel to the 1996 smash Twister), proved that Powell could open a massive summer blockbuster. And Hollywood has lined him up a few more – among them Huntington, a comic thriller inspired by the Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, and an Edgar Wright remake of the 80s Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man.
If Powell’s starring vehicles thus far are connected by a certain retro quality – even the ones that aren’t actively related to past multiplex hits – that doesn’t seem entirely coincidental. He thrives in genres, such as comedy, that are driven by individual star personality. In recent years, that has been anathema to superhero-fixated Hollywood, where longstanding franchise characters are a greater draw than the actors playing them. Take Marvel’s Chris trifecta – Hemsworth, Evans and Pratt – who have yet to carve out concrete leading-man identities outside the comic-book realm. That Powell, over his two decades in the business, has never been drafted into a superhero role is so surprising it feels almost pointed: he may be comparable to the Chrisses in terms of his profile and physicality, but his screen persona feels distinct from theirs.
“I think he’s deliberately cultivating that distinction,” notes celebrity style journalist Tom Fitzgerald of the website Tom & Lorenzo. “He seems to want to be a throwback to 90s leading men and action stars way more than he wants to put on a cape and pair of tights. He’s starting to pick roles that never really allow the audience to forget that he’s Glen Powell; total Harrison Ford-style above-the-title star turns. Robert Downey Jr aside, most superhero movies tend to tamp down on that kind of megawattage.”
Superhero films have loosened their grip on the culture in recent years as audiences weary of exhaustive franchise saturation and cross-pollination. Top Gun: Maverick was the biggest hit of 2022, riding a wave of 80s nostalgia and, perhaps, an audience hunger for heroes who feel a little more human even while performing absurd aerial stunts. Powell’s semi-villainous role was comparatively minor – it was Miles Teller who got second billing as the surly son of Cruise’s character – but his slick, snarky delivery and shit-eating grin turned heads; more than Teller, it felt, he emerged from the film’s success as the natural heir to its 60-year-old star.
For film writer Christina Newland, whose book She Found It at the Movies explores female desire and spectatorship in cinema, Powell’s Hollywood antecedents go back further than Cruise. “He’s in the vein of a Paul Newman or Robert Redford type: glamorous-looking but always happy to get his hands dirty,” she says. “He can play cowboys, romantic leads and action-adventure heroes, and is liked by men and women. He’s just very classically handsome, masculine, a jock type, and a real-life Texan on top of it. Compare and contrast to the only other more ‘bankable’ leading man at the minute, Timothée Chalamet, and you see what I mean.”
The twist, in Powell’s case, is a genial goofiness that counters all those alpha-male qualities – not unlike Ryan Gosling, another traditionally built hunk who dabbles in action but has never shied away from playing the fool or the patsy. (It’s not too hard to imagine substituting Powell for Gosling as the misbegotten Ken in last year’s megahit Barbie.) Newland agrees: “What’s contemporary about him is his willingness to be silly and play around, to not take himself seriously in the old-school sense, to make himself ridiculous in his various disguises in Hit Man, to joke around on social media. It makes his traditional appearance more approachable and likable; it’s a winning combination.”
Guy Lodge is an Observer film columnist and the chief U.K. film critic for Variety
