Cover art photo credit: People.
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Last week, after months of waiting, my friends and I made our way to the movie theater to watch Twisters (2024) starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. The goal of the evening was to have a blast watching some storm chasers narrowly escape death for two hours, maybe enjoy some romance, and see Glen Powell in a white t-shirt, cowboy boots, and a hat in the rain. Mission accomplished on all accounts. As we yelled our first impressions about the movie to each other in the parking lot afterwards––amazing! so much fun! couldn’t recommend it enough!––the thought that has been brewing in my head and so many others’ for the past few months came to fruition: Glen Powell is the next big movie star.
If you’ve never heard of Glen Powell, but you watch movies, you may have seen him before but not have known it was him. Sort of like how I used to watch movies with Cillian Murphy in them, but until I watched Peaky Blinders I had no idea that Cillian Murphy was Cillian Murphy. Some of Glen’s work includes The Dark Knight Rises (2012) (how ironic), Set It Up (2018), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Anyone But You (2023), Hit Man (2023), and the aforementioned Twisters. A busy man.
The first movie that I saw Glen Powell in was Hidden Figures (2016). This movie came out when I was in high school and is about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, three Black women who worked as computers and engineers at NASA during the Space Race in the 1960s. The role of John Glenn, the first American man who orbited the Earth, was played by none other than Glen Powell. And notably, John Glenn was the only pilot who decided to greet the Black women at the end of the line of NASA employees when the pilots arrived (according to the movie’s story). Though I had no idea who Glen Powell was at the time, his image was forever imprinted in my mind as a “good white guy,” and everything I’ve seen since has reinforced it.
The question that remains is, what makes a movie star? Surely there’s a lot of good guys in the entertainment industry, so that can’t be the only requirement. I think Glen Powell not only comes off as a good, kind guy, but he’s charming, an extrovert, he produces fun, big-budget movies, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he’s kinda hot. All of these things, in addition to the lack of a proper blockbuster movie star in the current zeitgeist, come together to present the opportunity for that new movie star to be Glen Powell.
Glen Powell has a very specific niche. He’s a charming blockbuster movie guy. Top Gun and Twisters are perfect examples. He’s a talented actor who can create chemistry with pretty much anyone and he can make his presence known on screen. He’s got a great build, perfect for the Hollywood adrenaline-chasing sort of roles à la Tom Cruise, as well as a conventionally attractive look that makes him a good leading man. Glen Powell isn’t showing up for the same auditions that Jesse Eisenberg is, for example. Where Glen excels in roles that are built for charismatic, overconfident but lovable characters, Jesse is made for more subtle roles, like superior-feeling, smug intellectuals. I cite The Social Network (2010) as my prime example. Both are talented actors in their own right, but they serve completely different purposes.
Glen Powell’s brand is perfect for the summer blockbuster movie. You need to get butts in seats with the promise of having a good time. This means action packed movies with a decent enough story (it doesn’t have to be an Oscar-winning script, but it has to be good enough to make the characters and their respective action sequences make sense), maybe a little bit of romance, and some hot men running around. That’s pretty much the formula. The Meg (2018) hit this mark. Top Gun: Maverick did this beautifully, and now Twisters has as well.
Twisters has an average 3.5 star rating on Letterboxd, higher than I was expecting to be honest (cinephiles love to shit on movies that are just meant to be fun), a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (with a 77% fresh), and the Letterboxd reviews follow the common themes of wow Glen Powell was hot in this and what a blast of a movie. Not to mention, the film did well at the box office, too.
Movie stars are built from the summer blockbuster. They understand the assignment. They know that (1) movies are meant to entertain above all else, (2) they look for and produce projects that they know are going to do that, (3) they’re the biggest extroverts and charmers you’ve ever seen, and (4) they understand that being eye candy is part of the job. Tom Cruise is a prime example. He is a movie star who’s conventionally attractive, delivers good performances, seems personable (granted, I’m not well-versed in the Tom Cruise lore, but the people he works with tend to speak highly of him), but who most of all is known for his commitment to his adrenaline-chasing and death-defying Mission Impossible stunts. He has gotten rid of the safety guy on set for not letting him put himself in harm's way for the sake of a cool stunt. I.e., understanding the assignment.
Glen Powell possesses the same qualities, and he might’ve even picked up a few tips from the master himself on Top Gun: Maverick. And the best part is that the audience feels like they’ve been on the ride with Glen this whole time. We’ve watched him work his way through Hollywood with small roles that grew bigger in importance and screen time with each project. And each time he’s appeared on our screens, we’ve rooted for him, maybe even before we knew who we were rooting for. And now that his last few projects have cemented him in our minds as a major player in Hollywood, we’re happy to keep rooting for him.