Much like the fun-loving cut-up he plays in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!,” Glenn Powell likes to have a good time. When he started his career, he was eager to put himself out there in ways that made him attractive to some, but an outcast to others. In a recent profile in Vanity Fair, Powell spoke of his early days in Hollywood and how things have shifted in the last year or two with hits like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Anyone But You” and new blockbusters on approach like “Twisters.”
“I came from that college-party mentality where there are no boundaries,” Powell said of acclimating to Hollywood culture. “Nobody gives a fuck about you in Hollywood if you can’t offer them something.”
For the longest time, Powell wasn’t sure what he could offer people other than his upbeat personality and natural charisma, features that didn’t seem to be doing the trick at first.
“I’ve probably been told, ‘You’ll never make it in this town’ more than any individual alive,” said Powell. “The odds are so slim that people hand that quote out like candy.”
The thing is, those people would end up being wrong. After years in bit parts, Powell is now a household name and the dynamic shift that’s created for him is drastic. His face is so well-known that he decided to leave Los Angeles recently and make a home for himself back in Texas where he grew up. Not that he’s any less known there either.
“I literally felt like a commodity for the first time,” said Powell of realizing when his star officially rose. “I started to think, ‘This may be a problem.’”
To deal with this problem, Powell seems to have compartmentalized his public persona and who he actually is. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he said, “It’s almost like creating a wrestler alter ego. It’s like you’re Bruce Wayne and Batman. Nobody has the full picture, so you have to be okay with them not having a full picture. It’s entertainment. I’m OK now with my personal life being part of the entertainment.”
One example of this was the recent social media push for his and Sydney Sweeney’s hit rom-com “Anyone But You.” To hype up the release, the two actors decided to play up their dynamic, making it seem like actual sparks may have been flying between the two.
“We leaned into the chemistry, we leaned into the fun,” he said. “We leaned into all of it — and the movie benefited. The fun part with Syd was figuring out what’s going to be noisy and sticky. People talk about TikTok as a thing that is cannibalizing the theaters, and what we saw is that they feed into each other: It becomes more eventized and more fun. Glen, the person, would not have been comfortable with that a year and a half ago. Now I can put myself in a different place and be a character.”
