SAN ANTONIO — First things first: It's as difficult as ever to gauge starpower in Hollywood.
During the 2010s, when superhero movies ruled the box office, it was more about the characters A-listers were playing than the A-listers themselves. In the age of Peak TV, actors are breaking out on the small screen before transitioning to the multiplex (see: "Euphoria," "Mad Men," "Stranger Things"), and as TikTok and YouTube amass billions of monthly users, it feels like performers are constantly a viral video away from being cast in the next big blockbuster.
All this makes it easier to appreciate the comparatively blue-collar route 35-year-old Austin native Glen Powell has taken up to this point—the edge of becoming a household name, if only by virtue of sheer omnipresence.
Some reading this might already consider him in that tier, recalling the pang of catharsis when Powell's Jake "Hangman" Seresin fully shed his antagonist sheen to save Tom Cruise and Miles Teller from certain doom in "Top Gun: Maverick." Others might've been in his corner even earlier, when he charmed the leading ladies of "Hidden Figures" as John Glenn in 2016 or Zoey Deutch two years later in Netflix's "Set It Up."
Still, it might be "Spy Kids" fans who can claim to have glimpsed Powell before anyone else in 2003: He had about a minute of screentime in the third installment of Robert Rodriguez's family-friendly series, and though he's grown out of the pipsqueak voice he sported as a mech-fight referee, the spurt of charisma is unmistakable now.
Over the following 21 years, Powell embarked on a steady, workmanlike rise. "Spy Kids 3" turned into one-off TV appearances, one-off TV appearances turned into spot starts in major movies, spot starts in major movies turned into a stream of leading roles across a variety of genres. Social media has reminded moviegoers that he briefly popped up as an ill-fated Wall Street trader in "The Dark Knight Rises" – it wasn't exactly a scene where he could flash that trademark, sharp-lined grin – while, a decade later, an expertly engineered viral campaign made us fall for the fact that he and "Anyone But You" costar Sydney Sweeney might've become the latest young Hollywood couple to fall in love on a movie set.
Powell has proven there's range to his classic leading man looks, and an ability to flip from sarcastic to sincere however fast he might be asked to. It's not like his looks have changed much, his magnificent, era-appropriate mustache in "Everybody Wants Some!!" notwithstanding.
If we were to identify his breakout performance, that 2016 comedy about life in a college frat jock house makes as much sense as any other. As baseball-playing upperclassmen Finnegan, Powell is appealingly ageless—as wise as a sage, as laid-back as an eephus pitch. More than anyone else in the ensemble of young hooligans, it's Finnegan's tendency to come up with something on the spot and make you believe it's a long-established way of being that most encapsulates the film's ethos. It's Powell who sells it.
Powell's role as Hangman in "Maverick" is the closest he's come to playing a straight-up villain, and though every legacy sequel to a yestercentury smash needs its archetypes, the actor managed to soften the pilot's hazing by making us believe it wasn't coming from deep down in Hangman but rather the machismo complex he's operating within at Top Gun. The snark comes from a place of sensitivity. That's why we as the audience don't groan when he flies in to save the day late in the movie; we cheer. That very same year, Powell starred alongside Jonathan Majors in "Devotion," another high-flying drama about military pilots. Snark wasn't the starting place this time; sincerity was. And though his role as Tom Hudner was thinly written in part to reflect the dimension in Majors' real-life protagonist, Powell shows off more throwback qualities through Tom's complicated heartbreak that brings "Devotion" across the finish line.
Then there's Powell the grade-A jerk, emerging in full force in the I-hate-you-but-I-love-you "Anyone But You," a movie in which sparks turn to barbed wire and back to sparks again opposite Sweeney. That talky rom-com, like "Everybody Wants Some!!," made solid use of Powell's hyperarticulate vocal cadence, a trait that makes the movie's insults sting all the harder. It works for the movie's eventual romantic declarations too, sure, but Powell's distinct rata-tata-tata-tata delivery makes you wish it were a movie where he and Sweeney never stopped launching one-liners at each other.
Of course, when it comes to "Anyone But You," it helps that the man looks good in trunks too.
So it goes that Powell's ability to slip smoothly between tones and genres, from the mirth of "Everybody Wants Some!!" to the melancholy of "Apollo 10 1/2," has resulted in his latest Richard Linklater vehicle: "Hit Man," which hits Netflix on Friday and sees Powell employing a kaleidoscope of exaggerated personality traits and character disguises for his fellow Texan filmmaker.
The movie, which has been highly anticipated in the film community ever since premiering to strong reviews in Venice last year, also comes at a time of peak industry popularity for Powell—he's graced the cover of The Hollywood Reporter, shown uncommon maturity in discussing the roles he's turned down, and revved up the next stage of his career by joining remakes of Warren Beatty classics and dystopian action flicks, among other projects. A TV comedy based on an Eli Manning sketch? Why not?
Suffice to say, so long as the critical buzz gets eyes to Netflix on "Hit Man's" opening weekend, it has the potential to launch Powell into an upper tier of young Hollywood stardom currently occupied by the likes of Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler. And if it doesn't? Well, we're less than two months away from his other major summer starring role: a little movie with breakout box office potential called "Twisters."