The Twisters actor’s career explains a lot about the state of the industry.
Actor Glen Powell's parents hold up signs behind him as they attend the special screening of Hit Man at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, on May 15, 2024.
A few weeks ago, a Reddit poster decided to ask about
which actors audiences were being “force fed to accept” as movie stars. They had what they felt was a prime example at their fingertips: Glen Powell.
“I feel like this guys [sic] is everywhere doing anything,” the poster mused. Yet they found Powell’s work to be “all just Meh.”
This is Glen Powell’s summer. After spending decades in the Hollywood trenches, Powell is now the star of
Twisters, out this week, and of
Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, which he also co-wrote and produced. He’s got big glossy profiles in
GQ, the
Hollywood Reporter, and
Vanity Fair. He’s been anointed, crowned, and feted as the next big thing. (...)
Part of why Powell’s sudden rise feels so notable is its strangely retro vibe. Today’s ambitious young actors, like
Timothée Chalamet and
Florence Pugh, usually flit back and forth between Marvel or some other big action series — to build their names and paychecks — and quirky off-beat films made by auteurs that will get them critical recognition. Powell, in contrast, has stuck to the genres that conventional wisdom has long held were dead: Romantic comedies. Middlebrow adult dramas not based on an existing franchise. You know, ’90s kind of stuff.
“I’m working to try to be you,”
Powell told Tom Cruise when he was cast in a supporting role in
Top Gun: Maverick, according to an interview in the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. But Powell also seems to know that his dream is unlikely because the industry doesn’t really make Tom Cruises anymore.
“First of all, there will never be another Tom Cruise,”
he continued in the profile. “That is a singular career in a singular moment, but also movie stars of the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s, those will never be re-created.”
All the same, Powell looks an awful lot like he’s going to make a play for it — by sheer force of will, if necessary. After all, he’s had a lot of practice. (...)
Tom Cruise became a movie star in the raunchy coming-of-age sex comedy
Risky Business, his signature commitment powering him through the iconic scene where he dances around in his underwear. Julia Roberts became a movie star when she flashed her megawatt smile at the camera in the cheesy-but-satisfying
Mystic Pizza. These were movies that weren’t stupid but weren’t particularly challenging either, simple and goofy mid-budget fare that almost anyone would want to see.
In the late 2000s going into the 2010s,
Hollywood pretty much stopped making that kind of movie. DVDs and then streaming, along with the rise of prestigious cable shows, eroded the audience. As the domestic box office collapsed, the international market became more important, driving a push toward spectacle-laden action franchises. The only thing reliably making money anymore was the ascendent Marvel Cinematic Universe, which in the early 2010s was just entering the so-called
Phase 2.
The new financial path for studios became: Focus most of your money on a big flashy action franchise, ideally one based on familiar IP with a built-in fanbase. Allow some money on the side for movies that have a solid chance at the Oscars. Let a more intimate movie get made here and there, but give it a budget that looks like a rounding error, which means it won’t have any stars. Mid-budget movies? Those are for streaming. (...)
Powell, meanwhile, had his sights set on the biggest ’90s throwback of all: Tom Cruise’s new
Top Gun sequel. Powell auditioned for the crucial role of Goose’s son and, once again, got close,
he told GQ. Not close enough: The part went to Miles Teller. Still, Cruise, who liked Powell’s screen test, offered him the part of Slayer, the equivalent of the Val Kilmer role from the original movie.
Powell said no. He didn’t think Slayer worked in the script. The kid in the tux in him who had put in a lot of time analyzing the way movies worked foresaw himself ending up all over the cutting room floor.
Cruise felt strongly enough about Powell’s potential that he personally called him to give him career guidance. If Powell really wanted to be the next Tom Cruise, he told him, the key wasn’t to pick a great role. It was to pick a great project and then make the role great. He got Powell to sign on as Slayer, and then he got Slayer rewritten into a new character, now called Hangman, who would fit Powell’s smarmy golden boy skill set.
Top Gun: Maverick was the first blockbuster of the post-pandemic era. It was also definitively Tom Cruise’s hit. Powell’s turn as Hangman wasn’t on the cutting room floor, but it wasn’t central enough to the film to be part of the narrative of its success. (...)
If Hollywood stops making movie stars, can you DIY one?If this story makes it sound like Glen Powell is an underdog, that’s inaccurate, in the same way
it was inaccurate to push that narrative about Armie Hammer a few years back. Powell is a tall and handsome white dude who could afford to stick it out through a decade or so of under-employment because he was getting mentored by Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise. He’s not an underdog. He’s doing a different thing.
The thing about Glen Powell that comes through most strongly in profiles is this: You have never read a more earnest celebrity interview than the ones he gives. This man
keeps a bingo board where he tracks all the character types he wants to play. He’s currently
finishing his final college credits because he thinks it would mean a lot to his mom. He’s got a book he calls
an icon wisdom journal he fills with advice from his mentors, most notably Cruise. He wore that tux. He’s a hard worker who is very earnest about the value of hard work.
Powell mostly masks this earnestness by playing insufferable assholes, less a Chris Pratt than a
Matt Czuchry. It may be that the closest fit onscreen to Powell’s real personality is the before character in
Hit Man, mild-mannered philosophy professor Gary, before he transforms himself into a cold-blooded killer.
Yet ironically, Gary pre-transformation is one of Powell’s least convincing performances. Powell doesn’t seem to know how to fold his broad shoulders in or soften his big Hollywood grin so that he looks less than confident, even when the character he’s playing is lecturing a bored class of college students or letting his co-workers mock him to his face. Part of the reason Powell pops is that whenever he shows up on camera, he gives every evidence of believing he belongs there.
by Constance Grady, Vox |
Read more:Image: Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images [ed. See also:
Netflix’s totally delightful Set It Up proves just how durable the romcom formula is (Vox). And, the original
Hit Man article
here (Texas Monthly):]
***
"On a nice, quiet street in a nice, quiet neighborhood just north of Houston lives a nice, quiet man. He is 54 years old, tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, with short brown hair that has turned gray around the sideburns. He has soft brown eyes. He sometimes wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a scholarly appearance.
The man lives alone with his two cats. Every morning, he pads barefoot into the kitchen to feed his cats, then he steps out the back door to feed the goldfish that live in a small pond. He takes a few minutes to tend to his garden, which is filled with caladiums and lilies, gardenias and wisteria, a Japanese plum tree, and rare green roses. Sometimes the man sits silently on a little bench by the goldfish pond, next to a small sculpture of a Balinese dancer. He breathes in and out, calming his mind. Or he goes back inside his house, where he sits in his recliner in the living room and reads. He reads Shakespeare, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and Gandhi. He even keeps a book of Gandhi’s quotations on his coffee table. One of his favorites is “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
He is always polite, his neighbors say. He smiles when they see him, and he says hello in a light, gentle voice. But he reveals little about himself, they say. When he is asked what he does for a living, he says only that he works in “human resources” at a company downtown. Then he smiles one more time, and he heads back inside his house.
What the neighbors don’t know is that in his bedroom, next to his four-poster bed, the man has a black telephone, on which he receives very unusual calls.
“We’ve got something for you,” a voice says when he answers. “A new client.”
“Okay,” the man says.
The voice on the other end of the line tells him that a husband is interested in ending his marriage or that a wife would like to be single again or that an entrepreneur is ready to dissolve a relationship with a partner.
The man hangs up and returns to his recliner. He thinks about what service he should offer his new client. A car bombing, perhaps. Or maybe a drive-by shooting. Or he can always bring up the old standby, the faked residential burglary.
As he sits in his recliner, his cats jump onto his lap. They purr as he strokes them behind their ears. The man sighs, then he returns to his reading. “Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed,” wrote Gandhi. “Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”
The man’s name is Gary Johnson, but his clients know him by such names as Mike Caine, Jody Eagle, and Chris Buck. He is, they believe, the greatest professional hit man in Houston, the city’s leading expert in conflict resolution. For the past decade, more than sixty Houston-area residents have hired him to shoot, stab, chop, poison, or suffocate their enemies, their romantic rivals, or their former loved ones." (...)
“Except for one or two instances, the people I meet are not ex-cons,” says Johnson. “If ex-cons want somebody dead, they know what to do. My people have spent their lives living within the law. A lot of them have never even gotten a traffic ticket. Yet they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whoever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can’t they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?”
