Glen Powell Is a 21st Century Movie Star Charting His Own Path | Analysis

Glen Powell was the hit of the summer. That winning smile, the Texas charm, the confidence mixed with dorkiness that permeated his characters in the blockbuster “Twisters,” screwball Netflix comedy “Hit Man” and traditional rom-com “Anyone but You.”

Hollywood’s no stranger to “it” stars of the moment, and each charts his or her own course that may or may not manifest the next Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts. But as the conversation around whether Powell is a “movie star” surged, the actor seized his in-demand status and took a different route: creating his own destiny.

As Glen Powell Summer was heating up, the actor was offered the lead in the next “Jurassic World” movie — a reboot to a franchise that’s made over $6 billion worldwide and that Chris Pratt carried over the last three movies.

He turned it down.

“It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” the actor confessed of joining the “Jurassic” series. “I’m not doing that movie because I read the script and I immediately was like, my presence in this movie doesn’t help it.”

Instead, Powell moved right into shooting an A24 revenge thriller called “Huntington,” attached himself to a new iteration of Stephen King’s sci-fi novel “The Running Man” from auteur writer-director Edgar Wright, signed on to lead the secretive next original film from J.J. Abrams and committed to seeing through a passion project of his own: a half-hour comedy series.

“Glen Powell is most definitely an up-and-coming movie star in the sense that audiences now go to movies to see him,” a Hollywood producer told TheWrap on the heels of “Twisters” exceeding expectations at the box office (it’s surpassed $335 million worldwide) and “Anyone but You” slow-walking to $220 million in theaters before taking Netflix by storm this spring. “Unlike an actor like Ryan Gosling whose appeal is mostly limited to female audiences, Glen appeals to both females and males,” the producer added.

The 35-year-old Powell isn’t an unknown. He made his film debut as a teen in 2003’s “Spy Kids 3” and turned heads in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!,” the Netflix rom-com “Set It Up” and of course 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.” But he didn’t sit idly by waiting for superstardom to come to him.

He worked closely with Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie to create his character Hangman in the “Top Gun” sequel after losing the role of Rooster to Miles Teller (he even conceived of his character’s third-act rescue), and he brought the source material behind “Hit Man” to Linklater and co-wrote and produced the indie comedy alongside the Oscar-nominated filmmaker.

Powell’s mode the last decade has been to create, not wait, and it’s that drive to ensure the projects he’s choosing are where he’ll have maximum impact that may be setting him up best for movie stardom.

“They haven’t developed stars the way the studio system used to,” George Clooney – one of the last living widely agreed-upon legacy movie stars – recently opined in a joint interview with fellow A-lister Brad Pitt in GQ . “We kind of were at the very end of that, where you could work at a studio and do three or four films, and there was some plan to it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case anymore. So it’s harder for you to sell somebody something on the back of a star.”

That means it’s up to the actors themselves to set up their longevity. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance. Aside from streaming films and voice acting, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt have struggled to parlay their popularity into the diverse range of roles that made people like Clooney, Pitt and Tom Cruise so successful.

The characters those modern performers are famous for are arguably bigger than the stars themselves. Even the MCU’s beloved Robert Downey Jr. flopped with “Dolittle” after his Marvel exit, and although he won an Oscar for last year’s “Oppenheimer,” it’s telling that he’s now returning to Marvel to play a new character.

“One becomes a movie star now the same way as they did in the past, by making smart choices,” a top talent agent told TheWrap. “So far, Powell has done that.”

“If I had to guess, he’s probably on the path of trying to be George Clooney, where he’ll want to act in some things, want to direct some things, want to produce in some things,” a top literary agent said.

Powell is not alone in eschewing the traditional movie star route. 28-year-old Timothée Chalamet, 28, heeded advice from Leonardo DiCaprio to steer clear of superhero movies and has made a career out of powerful performances in deeply felt dramas like “Call Me by Your Name” and “Little Women.” Even his foray into action territory, “Dune,” hails from an auteur director in Denis Villeneuve and raked in Oscars.

The 34-year-old Margot Robbie, meanwhile, started her own production company a decade ago, shortly after her breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” And while she still acts in films she doesn’t produce like Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and Damien Chazelle’s bombastic “Babylon,” she was the face and guiding hand of last year’s monumental “Barbie.” She manifested that $1.4 billion-grossing dreamhouse, hand-selecting Greta Gerwig to write and direct.

In August, cameras started rolling on “Chad Powers,” a Hulu comedy series that Powell co-created with “Loki” head writer Michael Waldron in which he stars as a bad boy college quarterback who disguises himself to walk onto a struggling Southern football team. He serves as star, co-creator, co-writer and executive producer. He also dons heavy prosthetics in the show, masking his natural good looks.

“It’s about choosing where you’re going to make an audience happy and where you’re going to make yourself happy,” the actor said of his career choices this summer.

Meet the new movie stars, masters of their own destiny.

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