Will Twisters turn him into the next Tom Cruise? The truth is it doesn’t have to.
Glen Powell knows he looks — well, like that. One of his early parts, in the 2012 romance Stuck in Love, was named, quite simply, “Good Looking Frat Guy,” and a number of his roles since then have been variations on that idea. His dim, handsome golf-star character on the show Scream Queens had a name — the extremely Glen Powell–y Chad Radwell — but really, he too was Good Looking Frat Guy. A running bit about his character in last year’s surprisingly horny rom-com Anyone But You is that even though he falls madly for Sydney Sweeney’s character early in their relationship, she thinks he’s a self-involved, fitness-obsessed finance bro who sees her as disposable. Hangman, the hot-dogging flyboy he plays in Top Gun: Maverick, is a cocksure jackass who thinks he’s the best pilot in the crew. Tom Cruise naturally puts him in his place, but when Hangman comes out of nowhere to save the day at the very end of the film, his unflinching, ice-cool poise is a rousing balm — a reminder that we’re watching a popcorn flick where everything will turn out okay.
Powell’s role in Twisters, the much-anticipated big-budget sequel to the 1996 blockbuster tornado thriller Twister, could be a not-so-distant cousin of Hangman. We sense that Tyler Owens, “a hillbilly with a YouTube channel” who chases storms with a Teflon swagger, will turn out to be an all-right dude by the end of the picture. He’s one of the only people — actors or characters — in this intentionally stupid tornado adventure who seem to be having any fun. Powell is, by all public accounts, a nice, chill guy who travels with his tiny rescue dog and makes sure his parents can visit all his movie sets (and cameo in those movies). He says he recently moved back to his hometown of Austin, Texas, to get away from the rat-race artificiality of Los Angeles. But onscreen he exudes the confidence and impenetrability of a man who just vibes with ’nados.
That’s why Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, in which Powell plays a philosophy lecturer named Gary Johnson whose part-time job is to entrap criminals by posing as a variety of different assassins, was such a sensation at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Almost every journalist (including myself) who attended the premiere declared it the moment Powell officially went from interesting actor to outright movie star. (“Between the glimmer in his eye and the dimples on either side of his face, this dude is such a natural,” David Ehrlich wrote for Indiewire.) The actor actually co-wrote and co-produced the picture, which not only demonstrated Powell’s range (at one point, he adopts a thick Russian accent; at another, he impersonates Patrick Bateman) but riffed on his Frat Guy image. A shy, bespectacled, jorts-wearing bore, Johnson is a genuine Everyman, a nebbishy shrinking violet who eventually does such a good job adopting one of his badass personas, a killer stud named Ron, that it starts to bleed (dramatically, sexily) over into his real life. In other words, Powell plays an average dude learning to access his inner Glen Powell.
And so at 35, Powell is attempting to become a kind of leading man Cruise would recognize, forging his path with roles in movies that feel like they belong in earlier decades: bubbly studio rom-coms, serious historical dramas, laid-back crime capers. Powell doesn’t just want to be a star; he wants to be a breed of star that we’re not even sure exists anymore. Which makes Twisters an intriguing choice for a leading man who hasn’t yet headlined a movie with instant success at the box office. Hit Man played like gangbusters at film festivals, then it was picked up by Netflix and soon confined to the atomized and alienating world of streaming. (By this point, the “He’s a movie star now” chatter had quieted slightly. “The press has been attempting to crown Glen Powell the next big thing … for years,” Slate’s Sam Adams wrote after the film’s Netflix release, “but he’s never quite transcended.”) After a tepid opening weekend, Anyone But You became a sleeper hit thanks in part to fans on TikTok lip-syncing a Natasha Bedingfield song from the soundtrack. Twisters doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — need stars to be a hit in theaters. The original was headlined by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, who, despite being familiar faces, were not considered huge names at the time. (Hunt was big on TV but had yet to win her Oscar; Paxtonwas mostly a scene-stealing character actor.) These are not movies about people. The attraction in both Twister and Twisters is the state-of-the-art storms.
The nominal protagonist of Twisters is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), but Powell represents the film’s area of high pressure as the road-hogging, merch-selling, yee-hawing Tyler, who seeks out tornadoes with a ragtag team of bellowing misfits and shoots firecrackers into the funnel cloud. (“We’re gonna fire a couple of flares straight up this thing’s ass!” as he puts it.) It’s a role the always-smiling Texan — who was recently inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame — inhabits quite convincingly. He’s portrayed initially as an ass, in sharp contrast to the more solemn and academic tornado-chasing crew of Kate and her old pal Javier (Anthony Ramos), who once, in classic Twister fashion, tragically lost their closest friends to a tornado. But as the film proceeds, we learn that Tyler is actually a sweet, easygoing, stand-up guy — maybe even a bit of a romantic. (There’s no sex in Twisters — please, it’s a Hollywood blockbuster in 2024 — but there is a lot of talk about getting tornadoes moist.) It’s sort of the reverse trajectory of Hit Man: There, the nice guy learned how to be a cartoon. Here, the cartoon reveals that he’s secretly a nice guy. Somewhere in the middle is Powell.
The alchemy of stardom is a strange and perilous thing. Actors use technique to disappear into parts and blend into a movie. Stars do the opposite — they jump out of the movie, briefly breaking the fourth wall and carrying us out of the movie with them. It’s why a star’s limitations can be more important than his or her skills. Think of the way the young, impossibly charismatic Brad Pitt popped as a boisterous one-night stand in his brief turn in Thelma & Louise (1991). Or how Harrison Ford’s weary charm allowed Han Solo to hover just slightly above the sci-fi silliness of Star Wars (1977). Or how Denzel Washington practically winked at us throughout his marvelous turn as the heroic and tragic Steve Biko in the otherwise somber historical epic Cry Freedom (1987). Hell, go back further — to how Clint Eastwood’s quiet, squinting performance in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) took what was supposed to be a throwaway Italian cowboy movie shot for a dime on the other side of the ocean and turned it into an immortal meditation on the western hero.
Powell’s persona is nothing like Eastwood’s (though it’s not that hard to imagine him following in the steps of the former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and running for office someday) save for the fact that both of them started to hit it big in their mid-30s, after years of anonymity and supporting roles that seemed to go nowhere. Powell was cast as local talent at the age of 13 in the Austin-based production of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003) and did small movies and bit parts in Texas, including a brief appearance in Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006), before his Great Debaters (2007) director and co-star Washington helped him find an agent. His years in L.A., however, proved frustrating with lots of auditions for big parts and relatively little to show for it. (You can see him, briefly, as a Wall Street guy who gets his head bashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.) He did begin to get noticed in 2016, after his turn as the hyperconfident college-baseball star Finnegan in Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and then as John Glenn in the Oscar-nominated Hidden
Figures. A Netflix rom-com, 2018’s Set It Up, co-starring Zoey Deutch, seemed to confirm his potential as a leading man — right as Powell was in production on Maverick, which got pushed back repeatedly owing to the pandemic, resulting in several years without him being onscreen.
Maybe it’s because he spent so much time in the trenches of Hollywood anonymity that Powell seems so willing to put himself out there nowadays, doing interviews and podcasts and TV appearances and sharing fitness and dating tips and shirtless selfies on Instagram. During the lead-up to the release of Anyone But You, rumors swirled about an offscreen romance between Powell and his co-star Sweeney. There was reportedly no truth to the gossip, but the duo played along with the chatter, spoofing their alleged affair on Saturday Night Live. Powell (who was going through a breakup at the time) credits Sweeney (whose fiancé was one of the film’s producers) with helping him embrace the attention; they even recorded a viral promo clip in which the two recite pickup lines to each other in the whispery style of ASMR YouTubers. It’s not hard to see how this only helped cement his image as a guy who is enjoying the roller coaster of celebrity while making us aware that he understands its inherent ridiculousness. Stars are generally not so available, but Powell isn’t afraid of being overexposed.
It helps, of course, that he’s just so damn likable. There are very few actors who could play a part like Tyler in Twisters and not come off as thoroughly insufferable. You would not expect this crass YouTuber to charm the living daylights out of Kate’s salt-of-the-earth farmer mom (played by the forever-welcome Maura Tierney), yet Powell makes such a scene not just convincing but inevitable. A young Matthew McConaughey could have done it, maybe, but people forget that the young McConaughey wasn’t universally beloved, his career often swinging between rom-com hits and underperforming dramas and action films. A young Cruise, my generation’s laser-focused alpha avatar, might have been able to pull it off — without the southern accent, of course, because the Cruiser was never really an Accent Guy — but Cruise was also very careful about how his characters were conceived, going so far as to demand rewrites to make them deeper or more likable. The actor was marketed as an all-American go-getter, but in the films, his characters were a lot more conflicted, struggling with daddy issues and abandonment and an almost pathological inability to face reality.
Cruise actually gave that advice to Powell while recruiting him for Maverick: Don’t be afraid to tailor the parts to your strengths. And it’s pretty clear that Powell has taken his words to heart. Before agreeing to do Maverick, he reportedly asked that Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski revise Hangman, who in earlier drafts was a nepo baby named Slayer and wasn’t even a good pilot. As for Hit Man, Powell not only co-wrote the picture; the whole thing was his idea in the first place. He’d been inspired after reading an article about the real-life Gary Johnson in Texas Monthly and reached out to fellow Texan (and McConaughey collaborator) Linklater about it. It’ll be interesting to see how Powell helps shape his parts from now on. He’s set to star in a Hulu comedy series, Chad Powers, based on the viral Eli Manning alter ego, about a disgraced star quarterback posing as a walk-on player (Powell co-wrote the pilot). And his upcoming films include Huntington, a loose remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets (the original had Alec Guinness playing multiple members of a wealthy family, suggesting that Powell isn’t done with Hit Man–style shape-shifting); a remake of The Running Man with Edgar Wright (with Powell in the role originally played by Arnold Schwarzenegger); and a based-on-fact legal drama called Monsanto. Again, these movies belong to an earlier generation, and they suggest someone who, for all the fun he’s clearly having, is making very careful choices.
Earlier this year, Netflix hosted a small meet and greet at the Sundance Film Festival for the actor and a select few writers. I don’t often go to such events, but I did attend this one. Powell was something of a man of the moment, months removed from Hit Man’s premiere and a deluge of glowing reviews; he had just wrapped Twisters, and Anyone But You was still in theaters. In typical fashion, once I got to the party, I spent pretty much all of my time talking to my colleagues instead of the star, even though Powell seemed quite approachable, gabbing along pleasantly in between bites of Netflix-provided pie. As he was leaving, however, the actor came up, shook my hand, and said, very earnestly, “Hey man, I’m sorry we didn’t get to chat.” He then briefly discussed my review of Hit Man, which he noted was one of the first ones out of Venice.
This shouldn’t have impressed me, but it did. This was a small group of journalists, and it seemed that Powell had not only boned up on all our work beforehand but wanted us to know that he did. It felt like something Cruise would do. It’s also, let’s face it, deeply uncool. One imagines Powell huddled over a screen, taking notes as he studiously clicks through a bunch of articles written by dorks like me. Modern celebrity is supposed to look effortless, but Powell shows the work.
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