When Glen Powell was in his early twenties, he wrote a letter to Sylvester Stallone. At the time, Powell was still trying to make it in Hollywood and, as he recently described, was "on the brink of starvation." Stallone was casting the third installment of his aging action-hero franchise, The Expendables 3. Powell, an unknown desperately hoping to join the ranks of a call sheet filled with late-career action stars, told Stallone about how he had been raised. In Texas, Powell wrote, he grew up with a shooting range in his basement, learned to fight with his uncles, and spent long stretches of his childhood trying to find new ways to cheat death.

Improbably, the letter worked; Powell got the role. Even more improbably, almost everything Powell wrote was true. "I wouldn't say I was constantly trying to cheat death," Powell said. But he did grow up "with a gun in his hand"; there was a shooting range on the family ranch. Powell and his cousins would put on plays at the theater — "The first play they put on, they decided to do James Bond," his mother Cyndy told me. "But there had to be seven James Bonds." Powell spent every summer learning to do something new. "Whether it was changing a tire, driving a tractor, or breaking a horse," he explains. "In my family, skills were very important."

Since then, Powell has transformed that kind of old-school masculine competence into a leading-man career. This fall, he stars in Chad Powers, a comedy series on Disney+ in which he plays a disgraced quarterback, and Running Man, a big-budget action film from director Edgar Wright based on Stephen King's 1982 novel. It is at the intersection of these two very different projects that Powell excels: both require an ease in the character's body, a natural athleticism that is often simulated in Hollywood but is palpable when it's real.

From Texas ranch to Hollywood stardom

On screen and in life, Powell radiates boundless energy and communicative charisma. He's the kind of guy who wouldn't hesitate to help you if your car broke down, but who could just as easily knock you out in two seconds if he felt like it. "For me, Hollywood is like a soccer field where kids run after the ball," Powell analyzes. And until recently, he remained on the sidelines. When he started in the business, around his twenties, we were in the middle of the Twilight era, a teen franchise that began in 2008, full of pale vampires and skinny young actors trapped in their own feelings. "Robert Pattinson was the guy you had to look like," he recalls painfully. With his quarterback build, Powell chose not to follow the path of dark and introspective stars like Timothée Chalamet or Austin Butler, instead gravitating toward a Tom Cruise, his co-star in Top Gun: Maverick, who became his friend and mentor.

A little less than a decade ago, Powell felt the tide turn in his favor. In Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), he played a college baseball player whose dreams far exceed the size of the field. After that, he played American astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures, a surprise hit in 2018. For Set It Up, a romantic comedy released on Netflix the same year, he played an overworked assistant crushed by the world of finance. It was a role in line with those he had played in his youth, but this time with unprecedented depth and charm. He had aged a little, and it had done him good, unquestionably. "The men I admire generally only broke through late in life," he confides.

The roles that ultimately propelled the actor to stardom are often those of rather rough types, overconfident guys who insist on remaining in a position of power. The actor learned one thing during his lean years: the image you have of yourself and the image the industry wants to project of you are not the same thing at all. "That's what's funny about Hollywood. You don't really have a choice. I gradually realized that people liked seeing me play arrogant, self-assured characters."

Billy, the uncle, and the art of vulnerability

He shares a story about Billy, one of his famous uncles who taught him to fight. "One day, a guy was trying to hit his little brother, my cousin. Billy told him to stop immediately. When the guy really hit him, Billy grabbed him and beat him up. And while he was beating him, he was screaming, 'Why are you making me do this?' Then he burst into tears. For the guy on the ground, it must have been the most disturbing beating of his life. 'Why are you making me do this?' and then, without transition, the tears." Glen Powell loves these moments when everything flips and the self-assured male sees his confidence crack. That moment when the jerk becomes a little less of a jerk, and a little more sensitive. "I'm fascinated by the malleability of human beings, our capacity to change, our ability to improve ourselves."

Recently, the actor has spent a lot of time in Scotland. Running Man was partly shot there, and it's also where he begins production on a film by J.J. Abrams — which we know nothing about yet. For the people of Glasgow, Glen Powell is a guest of honor. In the car taking me to my hotel, I hear a host on local radio: "If you see him, wave to me! It's for a friend." The actor, now 36, reached this level of fame rather late and now wants to enjoy it fully. He poses for selfies in the street and seems delighted that almost the whole city, including the vet he had to see once in the middle of the night, seems to know his dog's name (it's Brisket). One afternoon, he offers to show us the spots he knows best, which essentially means walking through the sets of Running Man. In this film, a reinterpretation of an old Schwarzenegger actioner, he plays a man chased by a legion of killers and filmed by the cameras of a game show. He shows us a few alleys where the team captured a handful of shots. "Sorry, this isn't very impressive." We end our walk at the Grosvenor Picture Theatre, one of Glasgow's oldest cinemas. A puzzled employee lets us wander inside.

A love letter to movie theaters and the industry

Unsurprisingly, Glen Powell loves cinemas. "Have you ever been to Jerry Bruckheimer's place, the producer?" he asks me (the answer is no). He met the wealthy, revered mogul while working on Top Gun: Maverick. "He has his own cinema, in the basement of his house... I'm going to have to make a lot more movies to afford something like that," the actor adds. "And on the wall, there are portraits of all the people he's worked with, actors, actresses, and celebrities, with their autographs. There's also the helmet from Armageddon, stuff from Bad Boys, or the green explosive beads from The Rock..."

We enter an empty movie theater. "I'm not sure, but I think we came here with Richard Linklater for the promo of Everybody Wants Some!!" Linklater, who has a knack for spotting Texan talents still unknown to the public (like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused), had written a difficult role to cast. "I needed someone charismatic, intelligent, and credible in the role of a college athlete," the director recalls. Glen Powell "looked like a beatnik, and I believe he was even reading Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans at the time." In other words: he was perfect. "I love his way of seeing the world," the actor confirms about the character he plays in that film. "The poetry he finds in every little thing, the life lessons, the group he founded to lead that epicurean existence... I even told myself I'd like to be more like him in real life."

Powell has told this story a thousand times: after appearing in The Great Debaters, he was introduced by Denzel Washington to his agent, a Hollywood legend named Ed Limato, who had discovered Richard Gere and Michelle Pfeiffer in their time. Limato encouraged the young actor to move to Los Angeles, to finally break through. Three years later, Limato passed away, leaving the young actor in an unfamiliar city, more or less on his own. And Hollywood is a cruel place for actors starting out. "I think it's crucial, when you take a hit right in the face, to take stock, to assess the situation so you can defend yourself next time." Like the characters he plays, Glen Powell loves combat, but he's even more drawn to what happens after the battle. "That's where vulnerability becomes a great sign of masculinity," he believes. "Not pretending nothing hurts and not trying to make it seem like the path was smooth."

Running Man and the philosophy of hard work

It was Glen Powell who contacted Edgar Wright to tell him he wanted the lead role in Running Man. "Actors rarely do that, because there's a whole process that goes through agents, and some are afraid of being rejected if they do otherwise," the filmmaker explains. "Glen texted me saying, 'Hey, I don't know if this is true, but I heard my name was mentioned for Running Man.' And he added, 'If I ever get the chance to work with you, I promise I'll work harder than any other actor you've ever worked with.' And the worst part is, he wasn't even lying." Josh Brolin, his co-star, confirms: "Glen was so consumed by his role that it put him in a trance. It's sometimes unsettling, actually. You think we're working on Running Man, it's fine, we need to relax, it's entertainment... But he doesn't see it that way at all. He wants to prove to others and to himself that he takes absolutely nothing lightly."

Rare in the Hollywood of 2025, fueled by digital doubles, Glen Powell performs most of his own stunts in Running Man. "In Stephen King's book, the character I play, Ben Richards, is described as a colossus," he explains. So he trained to become that colossus. "I sweated like crazy. I put on a lot of muscle. A large part was meant to absorb the hits I was going to take. But I also did it to impress the audience. I went from being an actor to being a high-level athlete." Powell's desire to perform his own stunts is a profession of faith in an industry that some say is on its last legs: "When people say cinema is dead, it drives me crazy," he insists. "What I'm trying to do right now, as an actor, producer, and screenwriter, is to establish prototypes that can win over audiences and suddenly restore confidence to the entire industry."

That's one of the lessons he took from the unexpected success of Anyone But You in 2023. "Some of my best memories in theaters are tied to romantic comedies. These films help us feel better. The genre had been snubbed by the big screen and only existed on Netflix anymore. Incomprehensible. Jerry Bruckheimer had explained to me that everyone believed the pirate movie was squeezed dry when he was making the first Pirates of the Caribbean. So when someone tells me a movie genre is dead, I see it as an opportunity to seize."

Celebrity, personal life, and the making of a star

Anyone But You, a modern and summery adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, was Glen Powell's first real taste of celebrity. Partly it came from what the public perceived as a romance between him and his co-star, Sydney Sweeney. An ambiguity that neither the production nor the two stars sought to clarify, knowing it would likely benefit the project. Powell's then-girlfriend, Gigi Paris, recently made headlines by claiming that the actor and the film's producers had even asked her not to visit the set, to let the rumors amplify. Powell is careful to qualify: "I will only ever have love and respect for Gigi," he says cautiously. "Everyone has their own version of things, and she has the right to tell hers. When two people separate, they each go their own way and tell their own version." We won't learn more.

For years, Glen Powell not only went to auditions but also wrote scripts. He even sold a few, like Hit Man, co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. Released in 2023, this quirky film tells the story of Gary Johnson, who, for the New Orleans police, poses as various hitmen. With a bunch of wigs and accents, Glen Powell embodies these fake hitmen with his usual cool optimism. When he saw the film in the editing room, he realized how much it reflected himself. "I thought it was a very strange exploration of my subconscious. The movie asks this question: how do we become the best version of ourselves? Who made us that 'best version'? These are issues that obsess me." In fall 2023, he and Linklater sold Hit Man to Netflix for an estimated $20 million. Anyone But You came out in December of the same year and grossed $220 million at the box office. In summer 2024, Powell starred in Twisters, which was also a nice success. He is now free to do whatever he wants in Hollywood.

Chad Powers and looking ahead

The plot of the series he leads, Chad Powers (premiering September 30 on Disney+), is deliberately absurd: after humiliating himself on the biggest sports stage and spending the next eight years regretting it, quarterback Russ Holliday must reinvent himself. With a suitcase full of prosthetics and a funny accent, he becomes Chad Powers, a backup quarterback at South Georgia University. Chad Powers is funnier, more sincere, and weirder than necessary, packed with references to shows and movies Powell loves. "We leave clues to guide the audience," he explains. "We wanted a given episode to feel like the Safdie brothers' Good Time, or old sports films like Rudy or The Natural, with Redford. Others lean more toward a Nancy Meyers sensibility."

Russ Holliday is a new character added to the gallery of slightly twisted guys Powell has loved to play in recent years. "It's partly because Glen is a genuinely nice guy that he's so good at playing villains," says Michael Waldron, co-creator of the series. "You can create a fairly unlikable character, like Chad, but Glen's magic will work and the audience will love him. What makes him a movie star is what he makes audiences believe: that he's going to make it, that he's going to become a better person. And they want to go on that journey with him."

Until very recently, Glen Powell found new roles the same way he did ten years ago: by auditioning. "I auditioned for Twisters," he says. "And I got hired." That's no longer the case, even for a big movie like J.J. Abrams'. Creatively, the future looks bright: Glen Powell should soon work with Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight. "Collaborating with those guys changes everything," the actor affirms. "I approach it differently. It's not off-the-rack; it's haute couture."

Nothing excites him more in his work than learning things about himself. "All these roles are part of me now. The one in Hit Man speaks to my experience as an actor: every character played by Gary Johnson is an element of Gary Johnson's personality. It works the same way with my career. Tyler Owens in Twisters is also me. I'd love to be that guy driving a truck toward something that could kill him. He understands both science and romanticism, and he has a great group of friends — he's the modern cowboy. Who wouldn't want to be that guy?" Certainly not Glen Powell.

Source: GQ France News