One of the surest signs you’ve made it in Hollywood is knowing you don’t have to live there anymore.
Film-making is a relentless beast and those who’ve toiled hard to take on Tinseltown know the toll it can take.
No-one knows that more than man of the moment, Glen Powell. Despite his seemingly overnight success, bursting onto the public’s radar after the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick
in 2022, Powell spent years grafting his way to stardom. Perhaps then it’s no surprise that he’s relishing the thought of having a break.
“[The benefit of] getting to this point in Hollywood is that I can now leave Hollywood,” Powell told The Hollywood Reporter recently, explaining he ‘s moving back home to Texas to complete his college degree. “It’s like I’ve earned the ability to go back to my family.”
Glen Powell and his family
Powell’s tight relationship with his folks was obvious when they playfully trolled him at the premiere of his latest film Hit Man, holding signs that jokingly read, “Stop trying to make Glen Powell happen”.
This grounding perhaps explains why at times Powell has felt success has reduced him to a “function”. “Someone will go, ‘Hey, friend, want to come to this guy’s house? Yeah, come over.’ And then you show up, and suddenly you’re there for, like, someone’s tequila launch and all of a sudden there’s a photographer and you’re like, ‘Wait, what are we doing here?’“ Powell told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think you get enough of those that you just want to bring your family as close as possible – or run to them.”
Despite his classic good looks – Hit Man director Richard Linklater joked Powell was born in the wrong era – Hollywood hasn’t always been kind to the actor.
For a period he was taken under the wing of renowned talent agent Ed Limato, but despite relentless auditions he never made it. When Limato died in 2010, the agency dropped him.
But Powell kept going, making it to the final three for the role of Goose’s son in Top Gun: Maverick. The part went to Miles Teller, something Powell told The Hollywood Reporter was “so wounding”.
Powell went on to portray Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin in the film, a character with echoes of the original Top Gun’s Iceman, and for which Tom Cruise encouraged Powell to “lean into the douchebaggery of it all” to nail. It’s not the only advice that Cruise gave Powell.
During the mania that came with his next role, starring opposite Sydney Sweeney in Anyone but You, Powell recalled some words of Cruise wisdom.
“I kept coming back to something that Cruise had said, which was, ‘The world’s going to become really loud, and it’s your decision how much you turn up or down the volume,’” Powell told The Hollywood Reporter, “because the world did get really loud, but I didn’t know where those dials were.”
Sweeney and Powell ‘s on and off-screen chemistry proved a roaring success with fans.
“For me, Anyone but You was such a treat to see audiences dance out of the theatre and feel so happy after watching a movie,” Powell told Variety in January. “To see the box office not just stick but grow has been such a cool lesson that sometimes the genres that have been forgotten are the ones audiences are craving the most.”
While rumours of a real-life romance between Sweeney and Powell were just that, rumours, (Sweeney was actually engaged to the film’s producer), Powell doesn’t have a leading lady in his life. He split from model Gigi Paris in early 2023.
Instead, Powell pours love into his dog, Brisket.
“When the sun is shining, you gotta make hay. And you gotta chase this while you got it. And on a romantic level, you gotta find a teammate who is down for that adventure, down for that uncertainty, down for that thing,” he told Men’s Health in 2023. “It’s a lot to deal with. Honestly, I really try to be a great partner. When I love, I love hard. I also understand that the speed and uncertainty of my life is a very hard thing to put up with.”
He is right about making hay. On the podcast Therapuss with Jake Shane, Powell revealed he is “churning out like three scripts a day”.
Shane, who works out with Powell, noted he sees him reading scripts while “dripping sweat” on the treadmill “every single day”.
With multiple movies in the pipeline (Twisters, in which he stars alongside Daisy-Edgar Jones, hits cinemas in July), he is ready to find some peace back home in Austin.
The actor recalled advice fellow Texas native Matthew McConaughey gave him to The Hollywood Reporter.
“He’s like, ‘Hollywood is the Matrix, man.
You plug in and it’s all fake world’. He’s like, ‘Then I go to Austin, and I unplug. It’s all real. Those are my friends, that’s my family, my actions matter there.’ And he’s right. If you’re here, you live in the Matrix all the time, there’s no separation of those worlds. And for me, especially as my parents get older and my niece and nephew are growing up, I want a separation of those worlds.”
