Glen Powell is the perfect person to take you on a tour of the Warner Bros’ backlot. I say this with apologies to Tom, our heavily experienced actual tour guide, who on this particular sunny day in Burbank, California, is attempting to add to Powell’s running commentary by directing our attention to a chandelier from Casablanca, or a jukebox once used by Elvis. Glen Powell is the perfect tour guide because the Warner Bros’ backlot – once home to the likes of the Animaniacs, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Big Bang Theory – is inherently uncool. It’s the kitschy zenith of Hollywood tourism, the LA version of pulling on a Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt in the queue for Madame Tussauds. And Glen Powell has no interest in pretending to be cool.
Don’t believe the movies – at least not the ones where he plays hot egotistical finance bros, or blows people up in fighter jets. Glen Powell is a massive film nerd. “Anybody who knows me knows I’m obsessed with this,” he’ll say, and go on to prove that a thousand times today, as you walk through the sprawling complex of gigantic beige hangars, bumping into random vignettes from film history. He’ll ask you to take a picture with him on the Central Perk sofa from the actual set of Friends. He’ll say, “Oh, this is cool!” and the cool thing will be a miniature aeroplane that was made to look like a bigger aeroplane in The Right Stuff. “My first school project in second grade was on Steven Spielberg’s use of practical effects,” he’ll say as an aside, seriously. He’ll tell you about the Saturday Night Live: The Best Of DVDs he used to rinse as a kid, and that his mum says he used watch the behind-the-scenes featurettes of movies more than the movies themselves.
Then his attention will be grabbed by something else: a large table and chair next to a small table and chair, and he’ll ask you to join him in demonstrating forced perspective, the camera trickery Peter Jackson used to make Ian McKellen look huge and Elijah Wood look hobbitish in The Lord of the Rings, and when you move for the smaller seat, he’ll say, “No man, you should be the giant.”
Glen Powell is the best person to lead this tour because this place was a major setting in his former life, the one before he became a movie star, where he nearly ground himself to dust trying to make it in the industry he cares deeply about. (Perhaps too deeply, he wonders at times.) “Look!” He’ll say. There’s the fake New York street where he played Brett Farnsworth in a one-episode arc of Without A Trace in 2008. Look! There’s the fake front stoop from Full House where the real John Stamos gave him a fatherly speech during a drawn-out breakup. The anecdotes will come thick and fast, and you’ll be surprised that someone has lived so much real life in a make-believe place.
“Wait – is that James Gunn’s office?” Powell says.
The (newly-revamped) Superman insignia is calling out to him like a beacon at the end of a long alleyway. Tom casts some doubt, but Powell is convinced. A knock; no one is home. We linger in the reception area, in the glow of the sign, for just a moment. Now that every door in town seems to be opening for Powell, it feels surprising to find one that, at least for now, remains shut.
“I was always a Batman guy,” Powell tells me later, as we walk through a hall lined with Batmobiles. Powell has no interest in playing a superhero, but flirts with the idea of Bruce Wayne (who anyway, is just a man). “I would have a wild take on Batman. It definitely would not be like a Matt Reeves tone – it’d probably be closer to Keaton. Oh, sick!” He has found Keaton’s Batmobile. “See? This is the era.”
Although he hasn’t played Batman, he has been pretty close. “I get my head smashed in by Bane in The Dark Knight Rises,” he says, proudly. Powell moved to LA from his hometown of Austin, Texas, in 2008, but struggled to find his footing as a young actor. He went through various agents, at one point repping himself. “When you have no one championing you, you feel like you’re adrift.” He would wake up every day and look at casting breakdowns, film unsolicited auditions, find out casting directors’ contact information and get a friend of his who worked in sales to call them on his behalf. “I was like, this town’s gonna kick me out regardless. You might as well kick down every door you possibly can,” he says, as we amble back out onto the lot.
“Glen?!”
Pam Abdy, the co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros’ Motion Picture Group – who is, by the way, in the middle of an interview with the BBC – has spotted the leading man of her big summer blockbuster. “Twisters was so much fun, we had a blast,” she says, pulling him into a familiar embrace.
Powell is a superhero around here nowadays. In the past three years, he’s carved himself out as one of the few leading actors who can reliably juice up the box office. Forgetting Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played the cocky antagonist Hangman, his value in the eyes of Hollywood decision-makers is higher than ever thanks to a movie that virtually no one predicted would become so big: Anyone But You, the Shakespeare-inspired romcom in which he starred alongside Sydney Sweeney, which has pulled in a staggering $218 million since its release. Powell has just co-written and starred in Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater, which was so warmly received on the festival circuit last year that Netflix coughed up $20 million for it in September. This summer he’s the lead in Twisters, a throwback sequel to the 1990s action film Twister, which looks set to revive another worn-out genre: the climate-panic blockbuster.
And then there are all the maybes and probablies in the works. He missed out on what would become Josh Hartnett’s role in Oppenheimer by a slim margin, he says, but he’s still in touch with Christopher Nolan, and has faith that they’ll get to do something together soon. He’s co-creating a Captain Planet TV series that Leonardo DiCaprio is producing. Unrelatedly, he’s off for a casual meeting with British filmmaker Edgar Wright after this. To steal the title of one of his first major films: everybody wants some Glen Powell.
It’s a sharp reminder of how far he’s come. In his mid-20s, when Powell was working as a script reader for legendary producer Lynda Obst, he would sit outside the cafeteria on the Sony lot reading, waiting for someone to notice him – believing he was just one accidental run-in away from glory. Now, when he walks around one of these lots, there’s every chance the head of the studio will drop what they’re doing and make a beeline for him.
As soon as Abdy has returned to her interview, Powell is back to reminiscing about his years of struggle. It’s fun to talk about, in hindsight, but they were scarring times. Throughout his early-to-mid twenties, Powell, who is now 35, found himself auditioning for – and ultimately losing out on – parts that went on to turbocharge the careers of his peers. In his eyes, he screwed up his audition to play Captain America. He came extremely, agonisingly close to playing Han Solo in Solo (Disney went with Alden Ehrenreich). “I can joke about it now,” he says, “[but] I blew that final audition.” Each time, it felt like he had missed his big chance. It was starting to feel as if the universe – and Hollywood – was laughing at him.
“I auditioned for Cowboys & Aliens, to play Harrison Ford’s son,” he says. As the role was a “bad cowboy” type, he studied his peer Ben Foster’s work in 3:10 to Yuma the night before the audition, believing it to be the kind of thing the casting director was after. “I was like, I’ve gotta be Ben Foster. Then I get to the audition the next day and I look at the sign-in sheet. The guy before me is Ben Foster,” he says, letting out a throaty laugh. (As it turned out, neither of them got it: Paul Dano, a very different kind of cowboy, did.)
It’s a uniquely torturous thing, Powell says, blowing an audition. One that stands out was losing out on 2015’s The Longest Ride to Scott Eastwood. “I remember Marty Bowen, who was the producer, just looking at me like, ‘Yeah, this is not going well.’”
We’re near the Starbucks formerly known as Central Perk. “I can show you Anxiety Square,” he says, referring to the peaceful little courtyard outside it lined with benches and shrubbery, where he would attempt to pump himself up before stepping in front of yet another casting director. “You’d just pace up and down here and try and get into the right headspace.” Despite the hurt this place was causing him, he loved being here, among it all. Things were happening. “Getting on a studio lot felt exciting. Whereas in your shitty apartment in the Valley, nothing’s happening.”
“He’s a really positive guy,” Richard Linklater, who directed Powell in Everybody Wants Some!! and Hit Man, tells me. “He doesn’t hold grudges, or feel like the world’s against him. He’s just like, ‘OK, that didn’t work out. But, next time!’”
He needed to figure out which version of himself Hollywood wanted. According to one agent, he was showing up too early – no, actually, too on time – for auditions. “He was like, ‘Hey man, you gotta be less punctual, like a little more cool actor-y,’” he says. Looking back, it seems absurd. “There’s definitely a bit of a game [to the whole thing]. It was clear to me very early on that it’s not a meritocracy, and I still believe that. I still believe that the best guy doesn’t necessarily get the job.” More often, he says, it comes down to a variety of factors outside of your control, like where you are in the pecking order of a certain type of actor, and which certain type of actor people are interested in at any given time. “You can’t just be good – you also have to be very lucky.”
He looked around, as he fought for even a sliver of work, and saw actors doing far less and winning. “All these guys who didn’t give a shit and just phoned it in were working.” Was he just giving a shit too much? Did he love movies too much? Was he “putting too much sauce on it”?
“I really do feel like a lot of Hollywood is which actors are in vogue,” he says. “What everybody does is end up writing to that thing. All of a sudden, when Robert Pattinson pops off, they’re like, ‘We want a brooding Robert Pattinson type.’ You see it in every script.”
A major turning point, he says, came with the breakthrough of Chris Pratt. In 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy changed the shape of the leading man. The broody, self-seriousness of Bale’s Batman was left in the dust in favour of the goofy fallibility of Pratt’s Star-Lord. The Pratt-induced shift coincided with his own breakout in 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s spiritual follow-up to Dazed and Confused. Soon, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor went the same way, and suddenly that was the type of guy that everyone was after. Still shredded and still traditionally handsome, sure, but with a sillier edge. “These guys can take a punch and sell a joke,” Powell says. It was a mould he could fit himself into. “I feel like that’s when I started catching friction on the sidewalk.”
Linklater, who had cast a teenage Powell in a small role in 2006’s Fast Food Nation, had heard rumblings about him from friends in the industry in the years since, but they hadn’t seen each other for the best part of a decade before Powell’s audition for Everybody Wants Some!! “It was one of those one-reading [auditions]. I was like, ‘OK, Glen has got it!” Linklater says. “I remember the casting director, Vicky [Boone], she knew him from way back, too, and we looked at each other and went, when did Glen Powell get so damn Glen Powell-y? You know, so smart and charming. What I really noticed was just how fast he is. I’m always looking for that hyperspeed neurological processing, somebody who can speak quick and make sense. [He’s] just a really smart guy.”
“I’ve got a bingo board of roles I want to play,” Powell says. It’s a literal grid that he keeps in his house in LA. The board is not tied down to specific roles so much as flavours of characters he’d like to play. If he was playing bingo, he’d be up and down the aisles quite a bit. “Twister was on there. Top Gun was on there.”
We’re in the prop house, a warehouse that looks like a cross between a gaudy antiques shop and the room of requirement from Harry Potter: shelves packed with old furniture that could be pulled from your grandma’s house but are actually priceless set dressing from classics such as The Maltese Falcon. “I’ve always wanted to play a senator or a president,” Powell says, standing in front of an exact replica of the Resolute desk from the Oval Office, built for the 1990s Michael Douglas romance The American President that later featured in The West Wing. (“No one talks about The American President,” says Powell, disapprovingly.) Other archetypes on the board include Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, an amalgam of which he feels he’ll hit in the A24 thriller Huntington, which is scheduled to shoot this summer.
As we walk through the halls, Tom points out the Iron Throne toilet, inspired by Game of Thrones, which is exactly what it sounds like. Powell gets childishly excited by the piano from Casablanca. “Casablanca is on the board!”
We walk past a bust from Lauren Bacall’s apartment in The Big Sleep. “I always find the coolest part about making a movie is you never know what one’s gonna survive the test of time,” Powell says. “Or when something small, like a bust, is gonna be held with reverence. You could make a movie and nobody gives a shit about anything from the movie. And then you make something and they hold it with reverence, you know?”
A man approaches us. “Hey, I’m Brent. Somebody said you were looking for me?” Brent, it turns out, was head of the art department on Top Gun: Maverick. On hearing this, Powell, who never got to meet him on set, starts to glow. “I’m so happy to meet you,” he says, giving him the same eye-contact-heavy handshake he gave me and Tom, with a little extra sauce. He raves about Brent’s work on the bar that Jennifer Connelly’s character runs in the film. “No one realises the level of detail when you actually go to these places.”
Top Gun: Maverick was almost one of those dreams that eluded Powell. He originally auditioned for the second lead, Rooster, but lost out to Miles Teller. “I got a call from [director] Joe Kosinski saying I didn’t get it. I remember that same sort of feeling.” But both Kosinski and Tom Cruise – who would star in and produce the movie – liked Powell, and wanted to make Hangman work for him. Initially, Powell wasn’t interested. The original Hangman, then known as Slayer, was not a good pilot, and had found himself at Top Gun as a result of nepotism. Powell didn’t think the character served the movie at all. “I said, ‘If I were editing this movie, I would cut him out immediately.’”
Imagine that, for a second: you’ve spent years watching life-altering parts slip agonisingly out of your grasp, then one day a real game-changer is handed to you on a platter – and instead of thoughtlessly grabbing it, you get out the red pen. Because you couldn’t just phone it in, even for the job of a lifetime. Powell understands that if the movie loses, everyone loses. Perhaps this is what Cruise and Kosinski saw in him: a preternatural understanding of high-stakes cinema, and the confidence to pull it off. “Glen really believes in himself,” Linklater says. “Not in a cocky way. He’s not afraid to put in the work to achieve whatever he wants. No shortcuts.”
In the end, the duo had enough faith in Powell that they reworked the character based on his notes. “What we were talking about is, how can Hangman service the story and give the flavour of the original Top Gun that you need?” Powell says. “I said my piece to Tom about what I do and what I do well, and he listened. Tom’s a listener. He listens to the crew members, he listens to his collaborators, and he hears people.”
Powell has a slew of golden Tom Cruise anecdotes, the two having become good friends. Like the one where Cruise flew him back to London from Top Gun: Maverick reshoots at Pinewood in his helicopter, and pretended that they were about to go down. “Tom goes ‘oh no, oh no,’ and he starts dropping the helicopter over London.” (This is Tom Cruise’s idea of a joke.) “I was like, ‘Am I about to be the unnamed guy that dies with Tom in a smoking hole in the middle of London?’”
Or the one where Cruise sent him to a cinema in LA to watch a “film school” movie he had put together for his friends. Powell expected to be among a crowd – but no, it was just him alone, in an empty theatre. For six hours. Watching Tom Cruise speak directly to the camera, breaking down everything he’s learned about filmmaking over the years. According to Powell, Cruise has no intention of putting it out into the public sphere. “He said, ‘This is just for my friends’.”
In the video, “[Cruise] is like: ‘Do we all agree that this is what a camera is? This is the difference between a film camera and a digital camera…’ The funniest part is on flying. It was like he put together this entire flight school. So he would literally go ‘OK, this is what a plane is. Here’s how things fly. Here’s how air pressure works.’”
Powell hasn’t yet made flying his preferred mode of transport like Cruise, which he sounds disappointed about – but he still flies himself about quite a bit, having obtained his pilot’s licence in November 2021. “I thought I could be Tom Cruise,” he says. “He has a helicopter and he’s flying actual jets. If I have to pop over to New York or Texas, in this SR-22 [a relatively modest five-seater, one-engine aircraft], it’ll take me forever.” He doesn’t yet fly cross-country, but he has taken friends to Vegas, Palm Springs and Napa Valley. These trips were fun, but due to his “no hungover flying” rule, not quite as fun as they might have been.
Cruise has become the kind of mentor that Powell really could have used in those early days – someone who can explain how all the bullshit in the industry works. “The one thing I feel we’re kindred spirits in is he’s obsessed with movies. That was our love language on set. I got to watch a guy who knew every department. He was able to clearly interface with everyone, and be so friendly and respectful and be able to communicate that vision.”
So ever since Top Gun: Maverick – which went on to make $1.5bn worldwide – Powell has been applying everything Cruise has taught him. Take Twisters, a movie that aims to replicate the kind of genre-reviving box office success of Anyone But You by harking back to the action blockbusters in which Cruise made his bread and butter in the early 2000s. According to Powell, Cruise explained to him that for a movie to be a global hit, you have to be able to telegraph universal emotions, to hit on anxieties that everyone can relate to. The weather, in 2024, certainly does that. “You can look at a big disaster movie and go, ‘Oh cool, the world loves disaster movies.’ No, no. It’s about who we are in the face of disaster, and what the human instinct is in reacting to it. How do you put the audience in the cockpit? How do you put the audience on the ground in the face of a tornado?” Again, Powell is thinking like a movie star.
“Is he in there?” Powell is peering through the windows of Clint Eastwood’s office. Eastwood is here all the time, we are told, finishing work on his latest film, Juror No. 2. But it’s not looking good today. “His car’s not here,” Warner Bros’ publicist Monica tells us. Powell is disappointed, but he wears it lightly. Another missed opportunity on the Warner Bros’ lot.
“What car does he drive?” he asks.
“A 1990 Lexus,” Monica says.
“The 1990 Lexus. Unexpected.”
We enter another museum, and walk by a headless mannequin adorned in Cavill-era Superman latex.
Ever audition for that one?
Powell laughs. No. “But I was on the set of Twisters with [newly-anointed Clark Kent] David Corenswet when he got the call,” he says. “He’s a hustler and he deserves it.”
Powell has learned, over the years, not to see his peers’ successes as his own failures. It did not come easily. He remembers as a teenager watching lots of his friends in Austin – including his longtime buddy Jesse Plemons – getting cast in Friday Night Lights, which filmed there. “I auditioned for it like three or four times,” he says. “I was really right for the role and kept not getting it.” It was tough to watch everybody else living his dream. “That was a part of my career where I felt like, ‘Am I ever gonna get a shot?’”
A load of actors in 1980s college outfits walk past looking a little bored. “That’s for All American: Homecoming,” Tom explains. A girl sucking a lollipop waves nonchalantly at Powell.
In Powell’s early Hollywood years, he would sometimes see a lot of the same actors in the waiting room before auditions: Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, Taylor Kitsch. “The weird duality of the business,” he says, “is that you have to be ultra competitive but at the same time it’s not in your power. I have to be comfortable with saying, ‘I did my best, it wasn’t meant to be.’”
Denzel Washington, whom Powell worked with in 2007’s The Great Debaters, once gave him a piece of advice that he thinks about all the time, which is: you’re running your own race. Don’t look at the other lanes.
Of course he did from time to time, though. How could you not? It has taken him years, and a few dream-come-true parts to get this zen about the missed opportunities. “It’s haunting when you blow those moments,” he says. And then you have to watch someone else go on that ride, from your shitty apartment in the Valley where nothing is happening, and think, That could have been me! “But that’s one of the parts of [the Hollywood myth] that’s not true,” he says. “That was always somebody else’s ride to go on. You know what I mean? It was never yours to go on. If you put your time in, you’ll get your ride.”
The buggy has pulled into the car park where we met earlier. Tom has given up, and Powell and I are sitting on the back seat, streaks of the midday sun slicing between us. A few days before our meeting, Powell had appeared alongside Sydney Sweeney on Saturday Night Live (his first time, and yes, he was gassed). If you somehow missed the media circus around Anyone But You’s release, people on the internet (and tabloid writers) convinced themselves, based on Powell and Sweeney’s electric chemistry, that they were having an affair, despite both being in relationships. On SNL, they had poked fun at it: when Sweeney name-checked her fiancé in her opening monologue, the camera cut to Powell. It was a brave thing, I suggest, to joke about something that had obviously caused them both quite a bit of upset over the previous 18 months.
“At the time, [the rumours] were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out!” he says. “I was going through a real breakup at the time. It was stressful.” He had never experienced anything like it before. He initially didn’t want to address it, and didn’t feel like he had to. But Sweeney had a different view. “She’s dealt with the public eye before, she’s so much more comfortable than I am.” Her way of looking at it is very practical. “She’s so in on the joke, man,” he says. “She’s a businesswoman, and she understands that who she is in the public eye and who she is in reality are two separate people. It’s Bruce Wayne and Batman. You can shoot Batman as many times as you want, it’s not gonna affect Bruce Wayne.”
So he took her up on the offer, hopped on a plane to New York and made a joke about something that hadn’t been funny to him for a long time. Now, so many years into his career, he sees the ways in which this dark machine feeds the work. “That insane circus around it took a normal romcom and made it IP,” he says. “It was the electricity that kept that movie going. And we made the hell out of that movie. I’m really proud of it.”
The absurdity of all of it was brought into full focus when he encountered a tabloid writer, not long ago. “He goes, ‘My buddies and I, we just smoke weed, get high and write the craziest shit we can. It doesn’t have to be true.’ And it sort of makes sense. It’s entertainment. It’s wrestling.”
Powell is figuring out how to separate his two selves, too. Not long after our meeting, he’ll be moving back home to Austin, on a piece of advice given to him by fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey, during a chance encounter on Richard Linklater’s ranch.
Powell had driven out to Bastrop, Texas, to visit the ranch with his father, and while walking around discovered McConaughey in the library (yes, this is the kind of ranch that has a library) working on his part-memoir, part-rules-to-live-by book Greenlights. McConaughey is an old friend of Linklater’s, the two having met in the 1990s around the time of Dazed and Confused. But that didn’t numb the shock of coming across Matthew McConaughey in an empty library on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, like he’s an NPC waiting there to dole out nuggets of wisdom. After Powell’s dad had got over his shock, the four of them ended up shooting the shit for an hour. Powell expressed an urge to put down roots somewhere, having found himself splitting his time between Los Angeles, New York and Austin. “He’s like, ‘Get your ass to Austin as soon as possible.’” (Powell does a great Matthew McConaughey impression.) “I don’t follow all of his advice, but I listened to that. He said: ‘Hollywood is the Matrix. When you go to Hollywood, you plug into the Matrix, you shake hands, you kiss the babies, you go in the rooms. People can knock you down, they can hurt you, but it’s not real. Then you go back to Austin, you unplug, you’re with your family and friends. That’s where life matters.’”
The advice has come at the right time for Powell. The monster-truck-sized Chevrolet he’s about to drive off in will be right at home in the streets of Austin. And so will he. He’s done the work in LA, anyway; knows his way around the place. He spent all these years becoming the Glen Powell that Hollywood wanted him to be. Now, he’s taking time to work out what he wants for himself. “If people talk about me in the public eye, I have to have a separation that they don’t know who I am. They know the idea [of me]. And you have to be OK with that idea of getting shot at. Does that make sense?” It does, I say.
“Now,” he says, “I’m in on the joke.”
Styled by Sean Knight
Prop styling by Johnny Goss
Grooming by Sydney Sollod
Tailoring by Marko Guillén
Production by Patricia Bilotti