Glen Powell: the charm that learned to produce itself

Glen Powell

Photo: Jennifer 8. Lee / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 21, 1988 Austin, Texas, USA
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter and producer
Known for	The Dark Knight Rises, Top Gun: Maverick, Hidden Figures
Awards	SAG Award · 2 Golden Globe (nomination)

The role of Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick almost didn’t happen. Glen Powell had auditioned for the Rooster part — the emotional center, the legacy character — and lost it to Miles Teller. The producers offered him Hangman instead, the antagonist who exists to be wrong about things, and Powell was ready to pass. What changed was a phone call from Tom Cruise, who rewrote the role around Powell’s instincts and, as a later gesture of faith, paid for his flight school. It was a perfect transaction: one movie star handing another the tools he’d need, with the understanding that tools don’t become a career by themselves.

Powell grew up in Austin, Texas — the son of an executive coach and a homemaker, a high school athlete who played football and lacrosse and then spent a year at the University of Texas before deciding to move to Los Angeles. He got to L.A. by a somewhat improbable route: Denzel Washington cast him in The Great Debaters while Powell was still a teenager, then introduced him to agent Ed Limato. The years that followed were not a smooth upward line. He auditioned for Friday Night Lights, for Cowboys & Aliens, for The Longest Ride, and got none of them. He built a resumé out of one-episode TV appearances — CSI: Miami, NCIS, Rizzoli & Isles — and supporting parts in films that belonged entirely to someone else.

The first real opening came from an unexpected direction. Richard Linklater cast him in Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016, and Linklater later said he’d wanted someone with charisma who was believable as a college athlete and arrived on set reading Jack Kerouac. That same year Powell played astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures — a performance that helped earn the cast a Screen Actors Guild Award — and he began to understand what it felt like to be in a film that people were actually going to see. Set It Up, a 2018 Netflix romantic comedy opposite Zoey Deutch, was the first film to let him hold the frame without a co-star of significantly greater fame doing it alongside him. The Guardian noted it was the first movie wise enough to let Powell take up real space.

Top Gun: Maverick changed the arithmetic permanently. As Hangman, Powell had a comparatively small amount of screen time and used it to become the thing every ensemble film needs: the person you’re most interested in when present and most aware of when absent. The film grossed over .4 billion worldwide. Powell executive produced Devotion that same year — a biographical war film that received positive reviews and then promptly disappeared at the box office — and began writing Hit Man with Linklater, a dark comedy about an undercover police contractor who discovers he’s better at being other people than being himself. The film premiered at Venice and landed on Netflix in 2024 to reviews that treated it as an event. The New York Times called it a genuine star-clinching turn. The Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy followed.

In between, Anyone but You happened. The romantic comedy co-starring Sydney Sweeney grossed 20 million worldwide on a modest budget and became its own kind of cultural moment — in part because Powell and Sweeney’s off-screen chemistry appeared to suggest an actual romance that both stars later admitted was partly a marketing strategy. Powell was unapologetic: that’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit. The calculation was either savvy or cynical depending on your perspective, but the result was undeniable. Twisters followed in July 2024 with an 0.5 million domestic opening weekend.

The critical paragraph in a career like Powell’s is not a bad performance or a miscalculation — it’s a structural question. He turned down Jurassic World: Rebirth because he read the script and decided his presence wouldn’t help it. He co-created and starred in Chad Powers, a Hulu comedy series about a disgraced football player who invents a fake identity to continue playing — which, as a concept, has an obvious biographical dimension for someone who spent two decades being the best actor in other people’s films. The Guardian called his performance one of the most magnetic and magical in memory. The Hollywood Reporter was less enthusiastic about the show but acknowledged Powell remained fully committed to all of its contradictions. The Running Man, Edgar Wright’s reimagining of the Stephen King story, arrived in November 2025 to mixed reviews and a disappointing box office — the first real evidence that Powell’s star power has a ceiling, or at least a genre limit.

The pattern across the last four years is of a man who understood that becoming a movie star was not enough and began immediately building scaffolding around it. His production company Barnstorm — formed in January 2025 with a first-look deal at Universal — is already active. He co-wrote The Comeback King, a Judd Apatow comedy about a country-western star in freefall, in which he also stars and produces alongside Cristin Milioti; the film is due in February 2027. He has the J.J. Abrams fantasy The Great Beyond, opposite Jenna Ortega, Emma Mackey, and Samuel L. Jackson, in post-production for 2027.

Powell moved back to Austin from Los Angeles in 2024 — not a retreat, in his framing, but a base. He remains enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, taking Radio-Television-Film courses via Zoom, with graduation projected for May 2027. He holds a pilot’s license, paid for by Tom Cruise, and in a pattern that has become characteristic of him, actually uses it. He is dating actress and model Michelle Randolph. Whether the Barnstorm infrastructure — the writing, the producing, the systematic expansion of what a Glen Powell project can mean — will ultimately be remembered as the work or as the frame that held it is the question the next few years will answer.