Rise to Fame
He was background furniture in The Dark Knight Rises, the guy who gets shoved around and doesn't get a line. That was 2012. A decade earlier, Robert Rodriguez had pulled him out of Austin at fourteen for Spy Kids 3-D as a local hire, and Denzel Washington connected him to his first real agent after The Great Debaters. None of it stuck. He auditioned for everything, failed constantly, and lived in a Bel Air family's house coaching their kids' sports teams to make rent. The break came when he tried out for Top Gun: Maverick, lost the Rooster role to Miles Teller, and nearly walked away from the consolation prize. Tom Cruise called him personally and talked him into playing Hangman. The film made $1.5 billion. Turns out the consolation prize was the career.
In the Spotlight
The numbers made the case: Anyone But You grossed $220 million on a $25 million budget, Twisters opened to $81 million and cleared $350 million. Hollywood started calling it the Summer of Glen Powell, which is the kind of branding that either launches a dynasty or ages badly. The Running Man tested the thesis in 2025 and the answer was complicated: $68 million against a $110 million budget, a genuine theatrical flop that immediately went to number one on Paramount+. He runs Barnstorm with a first-look deal at Universal. Whether he's a movie star or a very good run remains the only interesting question about him.
Side Notes
His father's original surname was Chutsky, Polish and Lipka Tatar on the paternal side, which makes the all-American golden boy packaging a bit more interesting than it looks on the poster. He interned for Lynda Obst during his early LA years, reading scripts for the woman behind Sleepless in Seattle. A producer passed him the Texas Monthly article about a fake hit man and he cold-called Richard Linklater. Linklater had read the piece twenty years earlier and never cracked the adaptation. Powell co-wrote the script, got a Golden Globe nomination, and proved he wasn't just showing up to be handsome. He moved back to Austin and re-enrolled at UT to take film classes over Zoom, which is either charmingly humble or the most calculated move in Hollywood.