Wherefore Glen Powell?

There's nothing out-of-the-ordinary going on. Calm down.

People are being so weird about Glen Powell.

And I’d like it to stop.

So I am now going to discuss it. And him.

Are people being weird about Powell because stardom right now is different than it used to be? It’s harder now for an actor to “break through” into anything approximating main-stream consciousness, and so when it happens … it’s perceived as bossy? We’re so used to a curated internet experience; when something else creeps in - like Glen Powell - it’s unwelcome, like he’s being shoved down your throat, like there’s trickery afoot? Is that it?

Our internet activity is dominated by algorithms, there is a lack of trust in information coming at us. A little skepticism is healthy. But Powell isn’t an algorithm: he’s currently broken through into leading man status and stardom and anybody who has been paying attention to what he’s been doing could see this coming, based on the last 7 or 8 years of his career alone (although I clocked it earlier). We are so used to phoniness and fakery that when someone “breaks through” it FEELS fake. Even though it is NOT.

I’m just guessing at the larger reasons for the weird comments I’ve seen ever since Richard Linklater’s Hit Man dropped on Netflix: “Is anyone else annoyed by this guy?” “Why is he suddenly everywhere? Ugh.” It’s perfectly fine to not see the appeal of Powell. It’s fine to wonder, “Why is he considered a sex symbol?” (even though when you do that you assume your personal preference in sexiness should be the universal. People find other people sexy for all kinds of reasons. If my personal preference was in charge of the universe, Danny McBride would be an internationally recognized sex symbol. The whole “what’s up with all the rodent-looking guys” discourse is gross and a commentary on how THE SAME actors look now. Even nerds have six packs. Once upon a time, Jill Clayburgh was a star. Once upon a time, Richard Dreyfuss was a leading man. Donald Sutherland #RIP was a sexy leading man.) Whether or not you understand “the point” of Glen Powell, he is here, and it might be interesting to talk about why.

I am hearing a lot of “Why is he suddenly everywhere?” Powell is not “suddenly everywhere”. He’s been working for 20 years, he’s been in a lot of things, he’s been directed by big directors, and he’s usually good, and now, in his mid-30s, he’s starting to get recognized and has moved into the leading man category.

That’s it. This is how acting careers sometimes work. It’s not a mystery. He’s not been pieced together by a marketing team. He’s put in the work for many years and it’s now cracked for him. BUT. Even if it hadn’t cracked for him with the one-two punch of Anyone But You and Hit Man, he’d still be working, because he’s been working for years, since he was a kid.

It’s not HIS fault you haven’t been paying attention and only now are seeing him on the main page of Netflix and getting irritated by it.

Being caught unawares by someone blowing up is, yes, a disconcerting experience.

It’s happened to me. It’s part of growing older. You’re like, “Who is this BILLIE EILISH PERSON [or insert any other name]? WHY IS SHE EVERYWHERE?” Billie Eilish is everywhere because a lot of people love her. Newsflash. She’s everywhere for the same reason others have been everywhere in other generations. It’s fine to not pay attention to every new thing popping up. But don’t blame the person, and don’t blame the person’s fans just because you don’t see the point of the latest obsession. (I have often written about the perils of ignoring the rapturous screams of teenage girls. I was a screaming teenage girl myself and I was right about a lot of things. I clocked Ralph Macchio before Karate Kid. I clocked John Stamos from the moment - literally the moment - he strolled into a scene on General Hospital in what was supposed to be a single and he was a total unknown. I was one of the thousands and thousands of girls who wrote fan letters based on one brief look at the guy. Girls’ objects of adoration may turn out to be nothing, but 9 times out of 10 it turns out to be something. Only people who think 14-year-old girls aren’t worth listening to are then surprised - and almost offended - when someone like Zac Efron is “suddenly everywhere”. It’s not sudden. You just didn’t watch High School Musical.)

Powell, however, is different, and this difference makes him interesting. He wasn’t clocked by 14-year-old girls. Something else is going on and the resentment towards him feels inappropriate for what is happening. It makes me curious, like something else is going on. Is the resentment because of his blonde good looks? As I said, Danny McBride is more my type, but viewing Powell as some stereotypical hunk is a category error. He’s not even getting those kinds of roles. At all. Is it that … rodents are “in”, and hunks are out, and it seems “retro” for people to be gaga over a hunk? If this is at work, my response is: Go outside. Volunteer somewhere. Laugh with your friends. People are gonna be into who they’re gonna be into with or without your say-so.

Early on, Powell was often cast as a prick. His looks are good, but they’re regular-guy handsome looks, a guy you could conceivably meet out in the wild. He’s not luscious-erotic beautiful, he’s not adorable, he’s not androgynous. There’s a pinched quality to his face, which could be read as ungenerous (I said “could be”), and he could (and did) play characters who might be deemed “punchable”. He seemed destined to play cocky arrogant rich kids. (In the 2012 film Stuck on You, just a brief 12 years ago, he appears in one scene and his character’s name is “Good-Looking Frat Guy”). As he’s gotten older he’s shown other sides: willingness to take a subordinate position, it’s not about him, friendliness to women, ease with language - he can TALK - unashamed theatricality which is almost corny sometimes, and he’s not afraid of the corniness. He instead emphasizes the corn. He’s funny. He’s not fetishistic about realism. He’s fine with being presentational.

Glen Powell could play Restoration Comedy. Believe me, not everyone can.

Powell was on the radar of some heavy-hitters when he was still a teenager, people like Richard Linklater and Denzel Washington, but he wasn’t being marketed as the next big thing. The IMDB dates tell the real story. 2003-2007 shows steady-ish work for a kid, but one gig is voicing a video game and one is an industry commercial about internet safety. He was born in Austin, Texas, and played football in high school. He had one line in Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006) when he was 18. In 2007, Denzel Washington cast him in The Great Debaters, where his character doesn’t have a name (“Harvard Debater #1”) but he has a big scene in the final sequence.

His looks are the embodiment of a WASP-prep-school background. He looks privileged. And yet, the role is not written as “cocky”, one of the more interesting quirks of the script. He’s respectful of his opponents, he is gracious in defeat. It’s a small role but important. I saw The Great Debaters in the theatre and loved it. He made an impression.

One can understand why Powell would drop out of college and move to Los Angeles based on The Great Debaters. He had a Los Angeles-based manager now and Denzel loved him. He had every reason to be hopeful. But …. nothing happened. For a long time. He appeared in a string of television series, Without a Trace, CSI: Miami, Rizzoli & Isles, where he usually had one scene, and was usually cast as a privileged teenage prick. He hadn’t grown up or filled out yet. These guest spots happened, on average, once a year. That’s a lot of time spent hanging around, working odd jobs, and having no health insurance. After 2009 … nothing for two long years. By this point he was in his mid-20s, the time you’re supposed to “hit” as an actor (or at least it feels that way) and Great Debaters might as well have never happened for all the “good” it did him. He lost his manager, leaving him with no representation. Everything stopped.

He clawed his way back to yet another stint doing short films and one-off guest spots, like The Lying Game, where he plays the head of a fraternity who wears a pink shirt. Punchable. There’s not enough TO these roles to even be typecasting.

This is not a man being groomed for stardom.

There’s no hint of what was to come. Jobs came in at a snail’s pace. One or two a year. That’s not even a living. I reiterate this to underline what should be obvious: his stardom is the result of hard work, patience and self-belief. His stardom came the old-fashioned way. Maybe that’s why people are suspicious of it? Again, I don’t know. Stop being weird.

He had a small role in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which represents a step up from having one line in Rizzoli & Ives, but he made no impression on me in it. What DID make an impression on me was his appearance in two consecutive episodes of NCIS, where he played Evan, the brother of a Marine (Brad Beyer) so debilitated by PTSD he has psychotic episodes. Evan spent time “over there” too, but has returned stateside with psyche intact, unlike his brother. It takes a while for Evan to understand just how sick his brother is. This is exacerbated by their father (Mark Rolston), a taskmaster who never allowed them to show “weakness”. They visibly change when their dad walks into the room. They are warriors, grown men, but they are still afraid of him.

These NCIS episodes are deeper than anything Powell had been asked to do. I don’t remember why I watched. I was probably bored. I was not an NCIS viewer, but Powell caught my attention. I watched the second episode merely because he was in it. I pay attention to such moments, moments when I get interested. I felt the authenticity of what he was doing. He also brought a softness to this Marine: the contrast between the softness and the military exterior was interesting. I didn’t realize he was the glimmering prep boy I liked in The Great Debaters.

And this, friends, is why he is where he is at right now. His looks are not of the type that pull you in in a seduction. He’s not Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise. He’s not beautiful Johnny Depp. That’s not his thing. Super beautiful people like, say, Alain Delon, have a push-pull thing with the camera, a sense of mystery and distance, the gorgeousness almost off-putting. Powell doesn’t “rely” on his looks. This is what happens when someone “grows into themselves” later instead of sooner. You have to develop other aspects of yourself - humor, smarts, charm - if you don’t skate on your looks. Except for NCIS, a fuller spectrum isn’t in evidence at all in the early roles. What draws you to Powell, what you could see in embryo in The Great Debaters, and which you can see very clearly in the NCIS eps, is his softness. You don’t expect a guy who looks like that to be soft.

This unusual combo - manliness + softness = Movie Stardom. Nobody is guaranteed stardom, but male movie stars - the ones who stick around - all have this rich-brew combination. Gary Cooper had it. Harrison Ford has it.

I’ve been trying to think of actors to compare, men who have traversed this terrain before. Bill Pullman comes to mind, although Bill Pullman didn’t have a six-pack-abs-military-dude phase. But Pullman is a blonde guy, handsome enough, who could be “written off” as some boring WASP until you perceive all the other things going on, his dry sense of humor, his abstracted quality, his thoughtfulness. In Sleepless in Seattle, Pullman played the nice but boring alternate love-interest. He brought humor to it. And in While You Were Sleeping, he was the leading man, initially perceived as the “boring” one next to the more glamorous Peter Gallagher. Pullman is the catch in While You Were Sleeping. I could see Glen Powell going the action-hero route, a la Harrison Ford, another kind-of-sort-of comparison. I could also see him joining a superhero franchise, even though I really wish he wouldn’t. William Hurt, maybe, although Powell has a loosey-goosey quality Hurt didn’t have. Hurt took himself very seriously. Powell doesn’t seem to. Greg Kinnear is a potential although Powell’s latent macho side is something Kinnear doesn’t bring to the table. Richard Gere, perhaps, although again, it’s not quite right, except for maybe something like The Hoax, one of Gere’s best, and definitely in Powell’s wheelhouse as an actor. Burt Reynolds is a KIND of precursor, although the two men are obviously very different. Reynolds was a goofball sexpot, a combination not to be tried by amateurs. Part of Reynolds’ effectiveness was how willing he was to undercut his own sexiness, and how happy he was being a supportive co-star to strong appealing women (Dolly Parton, Jill Clayburgh, Goldie Hawn). Reynolds was happy subordinating himself to his co-stars. There’s common ground there. Reynolds was also friendly with women. Being sexy with women is easy. To be friendly with them is rare, especially if you’re sexy as hell. I’ll get to Powell’s friendliness. Eventually. None of the actors I mentioned above are quite right, in terms of comparison. Powell is his own thing which, again, makes what is happening right now with him make sense.

It’s not a surprise that after a decade of doing one role a year in nothing guest-spots, he’d go home to Texas to work with Linklater again, this time in the glorious Everybody Wants Some!! I’ve written about Everybody Wants Some!! twice: I reviewed it for Ebert, and I also wrote about it for Film Comment’s Seeing Double column, pairing it with Shane.

Powell is pushing 30 in Everybody Wants Some!! (as are many of his co-stars), making them the oldest college seniors in history. But we’ll forgive that. Powell plays Finnegan, the motor-mouth ringleader-“philosopher” of the baseball team: he’s heard before he is seen. He chatters on and on … and on … spouting his theories on everything, whether he has anything to say or not. His language is intricate. He speaks in full paragraphs. He considers himself a Ph.D candidate in picking up women and he doesn’t do all that badly because he’s horny but he’s friendly. He takes Jake, the freshman pitcher (Blake Jenner), under his wing, passing on everything he thinks the youngster needs to know. Sometimes he talks just to talk. “Like they say, pressure’s a choice!” Finnegan declares. I don’t think “they” say that, Finnegan.

His clothes are all over the place: tiny jean shorts, a clinging silk shirt, a flowing hippie shirt, Chuck Taylors, a cut-off vest, a cowboy hat, he smokes a pipe, at one point he dons a top hat. All seem to suit him. His baseball uniform fits him so well it’s like pajamas. When Jake wonders if there’s something “phony” about changing your clothes to fit every situation, Finnegan says, “It’s not phony. It’s adaptive.” Big fluid arm gesture to accompany his words, like he’s a seasoned thespian. The pros of being adaptable is one of the themes of Everybody Wants Some!!

Side note: Zoey Deutch plays Jake’s sweet love interest. She would co-star with Powell two years later in the charming rom com Set It Up.

Everybody Wants Some!! shows Powell’s weirdness, and why it was a little bit difficult to cast him properly before, because no role would allow him the freedom to do what he does in Everybody Wants Some!! Finnegan is the kind of person who can be exhausting because they are starring in a movie in their own heads. They are ready to monologue, provide a “quip”, they need an audience. Finnegan is “acting”. It’s obnoxious but underneath the chatter is not hostility but generosity and openness to experience. He’s a little bit distant from the shenanigans of the other guys. He observes.It’s why he’s comfortable in a disco, a country-western bar, a punk rock club, and a theatre party. Finnegan’s tactic with women is to make them laugh. You should try it. He openly admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time.

He’s got gestures too. There’s something phony about the gestures, but not phony like he’s lying, phony like Powell is being self-consciously theatrical and “presentational”: Finnegan doesn’t enter a room. He swaggers in, “presenting” himself like he’s walking onto a stage wearing a cape. Maybe Finnegan will one day have to settle down and stop “acting” but in the meantime, it’s working for him. As played by Powell, Finnegan is extremely appealing.

Finnegan was not a star-making role but Finnegan is what made me interested in Powell. That’s when I looked him up and realized he was the blonde kid in Great Debaters - I knew I knew that face! - and the angsty Marine in NCIS. You would never guess the kid in Great Debaters had Finnegan in him but Linklater knew. In another actors’ hands, Finnegan would have been a one-note pussy-hound out of an ‘80s comedy. In Powell’s hands, he’s a bullshitting maestro of chaos and fun. A master adapter.

After Everybody Wants Some!! I kept my eyes peeled for Powell sightings.

Around the same time, Powell was cast as a series regular in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens. His character’s name - Chad Radwell - tells you pretty much all you need to know. Chad is a frat boy, rooming with Nick Jonas, while also having sex with the college president (Jamie Lee Curtis). Sometimes when things get a little scary, Nick Jonas crawls into bed with Chad, which has led to too many gifs to count.

Chad is another boring role: the preppy golf-playing douchebag who only wants to date popular girls. However, unlike all of the times Powell played a similar role, here there’s some irony to it. The series is an homage to ‘80s horror movies and Powell has fun with it. He’s playing a role but he also gets to comment on the role and all other roles like it. The real test of an actor’s chops is when they’re asked to play something broad and stylized. A lot of the new crop of actors aren’t up to it at all. They don’t understand style. They’re always waiting for their close-up, Mr. De Mille. They don’t know how to act with their bodies. They have no idea how to project their energy and intention out into space. (Talk to acting teachers who’ve been doing it for 30 years. They’ll tell you.) Powell is all big hand gestures and sweeping arms, everything perceivable in the cheap seats.

He touched my heart when he played John Glenn in Hidden Figures (2016). the same year as Everybody Wants Some!! Mitchell and I discussed Powell’s performance in depth, because he brought awareness to it of not just John Glenn but the history of the women behind John Glenn. This is what I meant when I talked about being “subordinate” earlier. He’s playing an American hero, for God’s sake, but the role is subordinate to the women. The way he plays John Glenn helps us feel that.

“Get the girl to run the numbers.”
“The girl?”
“Yeah. The smart one.”

I’ll pull out one moment: Katherine (Taraji Henson) is brought into a meeting with John Glenn and the military brass. It’s weird that 1. a woman is in the room and 2. a Black woman is in the room. It’s even weirder because she’s not a secretary but the one in charge of calculating Glenn’s eventual landing. Nobody knows how to handle it, except for John Glenn, whose instincts lead him to crack a couple of jokes. It may look like Glenn is just a jovial guy but Powell is doing something else, and it’s key to the performance. In that room full of powerful men, John Glenn knows he is the most powerful. Men know shit like this. And so he takes the lead. He recognizes this woman probably feels uncomfortable and even scared, so he cracks jokes to loosen everybody up AND to include her. This is Powell’s natural friendliness which I keep talking about.

Katherine stands at the blackboard and does her calculations. The room full of white men watch her. She finishes. Nobody speaks. Everyone waits for John Glenn, the alpha of the room, to respond. He’s already asserted his dominance (through friendliness, remember). His face is open and impressed. He says, “I like her numbers.” Big grin. He says it in that “aw shucks” John Glenn way, that milk-fed Mid-Western good-manners way, but it’s not just good manners. He takes the lead in what is an unprecedented moment, NOT just his journey into outer space, but what this woman must be feeling standing in that room filled with white men. “I like her numbers” is a moment of leadership.

His body seems very slight in Hidden Figures. He’s lean, upright, proper. This is not the case in Sand Castle, the following year. Based on Chris Roessner’s actual experiences during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sand Castle details the chaos, as seen through the eyes of naive green Pvt. Matt Ocre (Nicholas Hoult). Powell plays Sgt. Chutsky, a trigger-happy wild man with a jacked-up body, pumping weights in the desert dust. This is, again, another route Powell’s career could have taken, if things hadn’t broken for him to a place where he has more choices. He could play wild military guys (never the lead, though), and he could play smirky Wall Street pricks (also not the lead). One note roles, all. It wasn’t easy for Powell to find a wide enough SLOT to maneuver in.

I’ve read up on him. He is extremely ambitious. He wanted a career like Tom Cruise’s. Lofty goal, yes? Yes. Unreachable? Yeah, probably. But if you’re not going to believe in yourself, then who the hell will? It’s not easy to keep the dream alive while you’re doing one-off guest spots for over a decade.

In 2018, he appeared in Set It Up, a little rom-com with Zoey Deutch which is well worth seeking out. As far as I’m concerned, this was his real “break”, this was where a little light is allowed to shine through. Powell and Deutch play Charlie and Harper, two beleaguered assistants working for tyrannical bosses. Charlie and Harper come up with a cockamamie plan to set up their bosses, to force them to fall in love. Because then … the bosses will loosen up at work? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a rom com. It doesn’t have to. Charlie wants to be a finance bro, a King of Industry, and he’s dating a model who treats him like shit, but it’s a status thing for him, and Harper wants to be a writer and is working for her idol, played by Lucy Liu, a famous sports journalist who … established her own sports news website? (Hollywood’s idea of what is going on in media right now is so out of date. It’s like it never stopped being 1999.) Regardless. Harper suggests they “Cyrano” their bosses. Charlie agrees, even though he doesn’t know what “Cyrano” means.

Charlie is a bit of a douche, and his dreams are questionable. Harper is ambitious but has no time to write. Without realizing it’s happening, the two become involved in each others’ lives. They talk to each other more than they talk to anyone else. A bond forms. This is territory Powell had not yet been given space for: a character who has to change over the course of a film. He manages it effortlessly. He’s funny and exasperated and expressive: Powell is not the strong silent smoldering Tom Hardy type. His sensibility is extroverted and comedic. In my opinion, his gift is in the comedic realm, but we’ll see how that goes, Hollywood being what it is.

There’s a moment in Set It Up where he says something cruel to Harper which he instantly regrets. The comment flies out of his mouth in the heat of the moment and Harper looks like he has stabbed her. Her eyes fill with tears. Powell has a silent brief moment where you see his regret, his sharp pang of guilt, how horrible he feels when he sees the pain on her face, knowing … that’s the kind of shit I can’t walk back. It’s small, but of such moments an effective and coherent career is actually made.

Top Gun: Maverick was an interesting situation. Powell was cast in it! A Tom Cruise movie! He got the role of “Hangman”, the cocky daredevil! It was a dream come true. The pandemic arrived a couple months before Top Gun: Maverick was set for its big summer release into theatres. Tom Cruise made the executive decision - true to his risk-taking self - to hold off opening the film until theatres were back in operation. He refused to dump Top Gun: Maverick onto streaming platforms. It had to be seen on a big screen. The risk paid off. (Top Gun: Maverick didn’t arrive until summer 2022, which also, incidentally, was the summer of Elvis. Those two films opened and then sat there, earning money, for three straight months. It was wild.) Consider all this from Glen Powell’s point of view. Yes, he worked a lot. But he was basically an unknown as far as the larger public was concerned. Tom Cruise could afford to wait. Powell did this huge thing, and then had to sit around waiting for two years.

Because Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t just a movie, it was an EVENT, and because Glen Powell played a key role - not the second lead (that would be Miles Teller), but the third lead, the “adversary” - he started getting press. People started noticing.

He looked hot, in an American military boy kind of way, and had a nice redemption arc as well (which you could see coming from a mile away, but never mind.) Just like with Set It Up, we saw Hangman grow and change. The role was still that cocky self-satisfied thing he spent most of his 20s doing … but it was on a much bigger stage.

2022 also saw Devotion, an under-seen film (it got good reviews, it should be better known), which Powell developed and produced, after reading the book Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice, by military historian Adam Makos. Devotion details the life and career of Jesse Brown, the first Black man to complete aviation training in the U.S. Navy, the only Black aviator in his particular squadron, and the first Black man killed in the Korean War. His remains were never recovered from his downed aircraft (destroyed by napalm two days after it crashed). Brown’s friend and fellow aviator Tom Hudner spent the rest of his life trying to get the United States government to retrieve Brown’s remains. Hudner died in 2017, and his children - and grandchildren - alongside Brown’s children - and grandchildren - continue to advocate for Brown’s return. Hudner faced incredible danger trying to save Brown - seriously, the story is insane - and received the Medal of Honor for it.

Powell gave the book to Black Label Media, which optioned it. Powell played Tom Hudner and the fantastic Jonathan Majors played Jesse. The narrative is split between Hudner and Brown, tilting in favor of Brown (we see Brown’s home life, his marriage, his child, we see Brown by himself, we don’t see any of that with Hudner), making this a refreshingly even story, the events not just seen through the white character’s eyes.

Hudner is ignorant to racism, or at least what it must feel like on the other side of it. He thinks it’s unfair the way the other guys treat Brown, and he’s ready to throw down if there’s an insult, but he doesn’t understand why Brown does not want him sticking up for him. Hudner’s overtures of friendship are at first rejected, and he’s clueless about certain things, like what a huge deal it is when he is invited by Brown’s wife to come inside the house and have a drink. It’s 1950. He’s not up to speed on what skin color means. This is not about Brown teaching Hudner, although there are times when Brown schools Hudner. The friendship is deep, based on shared experiences in aviation training, and also combat itself. Hudner’s heroic actions to try to save Brown is impressive, but so are Brown’s actions in the air, his bravery and skill, plus the sheer guts it took to go through with it all in the first place.

Devotion handles these issues in a sensitive manner by keeping its focus on the details of the interactions between the two men, the attempt - on both sides - to understand the other. The photos at the end of Hudner’s grandkids and Brown’s grandkids standing side by side nearly killed me. I loved the film.

For me, Set It Up and Devotion set the stage for what came next, which was Anyone But You and The Hitman. In Devotion he played another military guy but was allowed depth and character development. In Set It Up, he was a little shallow at first and gained depth by the end, and we got to see a character arc. Powell was now where he should be, playing actual people, who could grow and change.

Anyone But You seemed to take a lot of people by surprise. This is revealing and makes me think about the plight of rom-coms today, and how hungry people still are for them. People still find them cathartic and fun. It was Sydney Sweeney’s project, she produced, she picked the team, she picked Powell, saying he seemed “thoughtful, onscreen and off.” Sweeney is young, and … wow, talk about people having a weird reaction. Right-wingers are somehow using her as a cudgel in their culture war, but in such a weird gross way, i.e. “Boobs are still important to red-blooded American males”. Who said boobs weren’t attractive to men “anymore”? You’re just making that shit up. I almost miss the days when fundamentalists were like “We abhor boobs onscreen. Stop sinning.” Like Powell, Sweeney hasn’t had the chance to show much range. Maybe I assumed there wasn’t that much range to show. My bad. I reviewed 2023’s Reality, based on Tina Satter’s play of the same name (Satter also directed), and I was so impressed, not just with the end result, but with Sweeney’s participation in such a bare-bones political project. Her choice to be in Reality told me a lot about Sweeney and her interests, what she wanted for her career, and also her thoughtfulness - speaking of which - about the projects she leant her talent to.

Anyone But You is a rom-com based - loosely - on Much Ado About Nothing, where two people - Beatrice and Benedick - declare they hate each other but are actually in love the whole time. Families gather for a wedding, and the warring couple spar back and forth, stealing focus. Will Gluck was brought on to direct. Two of his earlier films - Easy A and Friends with Benefits - have a loopy hilarious energy, with zippy dialogue, and a lot of hijinx and shenanigans. They’re good. So is Anyone But You. You can’t try to bury the lede in a rom-com. You’re not re-inventing the wheel. The formula works. Use it. Don’t be shy.

Sweeney plays Bea and Powell plays Ben (get it?) who meet-cute within 5 seconds of the film opening. They have a great night together which goes south almost immediately. They are now enemies even though it turns out - what a coincidence - that they not only have friends but family in common. Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) is engaged to Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), Ben’s friend, and … the sister? Maybe? I missed it. of Ben’s best friend Pete (Gata). The wedding is in Sydney Australia for some reason and the entire crowd gets on a plane and heads off down under.

After Ben and Bea’s hostility brings the overall mood down, the family schemes to get them together, just so the wedding can proceed in peace. Ben and Bea “overhear” all these conversations (“Bea likes Ben!” “Have you heard? Ben likes Bea!”), realize what is happening, and decide to play along to get everyone off their backs. This allows for a lot of humorous sequences where Powell and Sweeney have to pretend to like each other, even though they’re grossed out even by holding hands. The situation is complicated by old love interests showing up, on both sides.

You got all that? It’s pure ridiculousness. Powell and Sweeney have a blast with it from the first sequence in the coffee shop until the final moment. They drum up real feeling, and their chemistry sizzles. It’s a human connection, not just sexual, although it is that too. They obviously are having fun. They play around. They ramp each other up. It ends, of course, with Ben running madly to find his woman, staging a dramatic rescue, so they can come together, at last.

It’s refreshing to see a couple with real heat between them. It’s refreshing to see people being silly and committing to various “bits”. Everyone participates. The “vibe” between men and women right now is so toxic, at least for the Chronically Online, and I think it has made directors shy away from rom coms. Nobody knows how to “deal” with it anymore and so romance is best avoided. A film like Sitting in Bars with Cake - I’m only mentioning it because I reviewed it - can’t even portray its own damn premise (a woman starts baking cakes and bringing them to bars as a way to meet men). It’s based on a true story. The film avoids the “longing for a boyfriend” part of the equation because … women are supposed to be “past that” now, or something? So the film erases her unhappy single state - she’s FINE with being single, she’s a strong independent woman! - which then makes it so confusing why she spends all this time baking and bringing cakes to bars to meet men. You can be strong and independent and still want a boyfriend. Shocking. I know.

It’s fun to watch a man and a woman play around like Powell and Sweeney do in Anyone But You, flirt, and fight, and bicker, and pretend to be in love, all while getting more and more attracted. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s romantic attachment in The Fall Guy - and their pretend anger at each other - is so charming it practically makes the whole damn movie (even though every other part of it is good too). People still want to connect. Let them connect in the movies. There’s no shame in it.

Even the dreaded age gap between Sweeney and Powell is acknowledged with humor and a little bit of snark.

He: “This is so cringe.”
She: “Don’t say cringe, old man.”

Powell and Sweeney are so good together, so silly, and then - surprisingly - so tender - it all works. You want them to kiss and it’s satisfying when they do. Mission accomplished.

A couple of months after Anyone But You was a surprise hit (although it’s harder to tell these days without box office receipts), Linklater’s latest, Hit Man, dropped. I’ve been looking forward to it for months. Based on an article by Texas legend Skip Hollandsworth, Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson, philosophy professor by day, and part-time New Orleans cop (sort of) by night. Gary poses as a hit man to “sting” the people trying to hire a contract killer. Gary Johnson the real guy got really into it, utilizing disguises and accents and fake noses, and his arrest record was excellent. (Hollandsworth also wrote the article that became Bernie, another great Linklater film, starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine.) Powell not only bought the rights to the article but wrote the screenplay with Linklater. He’d come a long way from having one line in Fast Food Nation when he was 18.

Here, Glen Powell gets to put it all together, gets to show what he can do. He’s totally believable as the nerdy professor, with hair slicked down, wearing bulky khakis and long denim shorts. Of course when he eventually takes off his shirt his body is BANANAS, but we’ll let that slide. Gary is a chronically single guy who likes to go birding, feed his cats, and falls asleep with a book about Gandhi on his bedside table. I don’t question it for a second. Gary is roped into posing as a hit man when someone else is suspended from the force, and he finds he has a knack for it. Pretending to be someone else loosens him up, sets free parts of his personality he didn’t even know he had. He has fun dressing up. Then he puts on his khakis, and goes off to lecture on Nietzsche.

All of these transformations are played for laughs, and allows Powell to indulge in the broad theatricality for which he has always had a knack. He’s not trying to “disappear” into the role. It’s the opposite. His accents are not even close to being realistic, and his personae are absurd. One seems to be based on Tilda Swinton. Things gets complicated when he meets a mysterious woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who asks him to kill her husband. Gary is, of course, attracted to her and finds himself talking her out of it, much to the annoyance of his colleagues. Gary pretends to be hit man Ron: Ron is not Tilda Swinton, but a sexy swaggering confident guy. He’s hot, a sexy take-charge guy, squinting moodily into the distance over the difficulties of his life, being mysterious and charming, the Perfect Guy.

We’ve never seen Glen Powell like this before. It’s pure Harrison Ford Leading Man stuff, and yet here - there’s irony, it’s not real. Ron is a role being played by nerdy bird-lover Gary. And so there’s a wink behind Powell’s very sexy performance as Ron. We know Gary is acting. So is Powell. He’s playing a role but also commenting on the TYPE of role it is. We saw him do this in Scream Queens. It’s the layered theatrical presentational thing Powell can do very well, without - somehow - being a bad actor. Finnegan was the peak of this (but Finnegan may very well be a one-of-a-kind role).

Does Powell have movie-star charisma? I think he could, but so far that hasn’t been his thing. He’s not trying to be Brad Pitt. Like Gary Johnson, he tries on different roles, inhabits them, believes in them fully while he wears the costume, and then moves on to the next one. He can hold the screen, that’s for sure, and he’s sexy but in a very real-guy way. When he pretends to be Ron in The Hit Man, he’s sexy with a capital S. But it’s not where he operates from. Underneath is softness and tenderness, which isn’t always there (it isn’t in Sand Castle), but can be there if he needs it. He’s very smart, and sensitive to material and style. He was this way even back in the dark ages, when he got the two-episode NCIS gig, which was probably a very very big deal for him at that time. Two episodes, playing a role where he actually got to DO something. He’d never had to sustain anything, he’d never had room to develop anything.

And I watched him in those episodes and thought to myself: “WHO is THAT”.

I always pay attention when I catch myself thinking “WHO is THAT”.

It usually turns out to be something.

Nothing weird to see here.

Glen Powell is “suddenly everywhere” for a reason.