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.
.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 heart-throb, a goofball comedian or an everyman action hero.
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The big test comes this weekend: Twisters, an effects-heavy disaster movie (and long-belated sequel to the 1996 smash Twister) that will prove whether Powell can open a massive summer blockbuster. Even if it doesn’t, Hollywood has lined him up a few more tries – 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.
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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”.
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.
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.
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.
At 35, he’s not exactly wet behind the ears; he has been acting since his teens (having made his big-screen debut aged 14 in Spy Kids 3D: Game Over) and has played enough unremarkable bit parts that his delight in seizing lead roles feels palpable without tipping over into an overeagerness to please.
His public appearances follow suit: he’s chatty and self-deprecating, dresses sharply but with little regard for high fashion (Fitzgerald describes his style as akin to “the best-looking guy from the town you grew up in”) and frequently brings his scruffy rescue dog Brisket to the red carpet – a crowd-pleasing ploy, certainly, but one that suggests he’d rather be a star on his own terms.
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