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Over the last three years, actor Glen Powell has been the man of the moment, with starring roles in the biggest movie of 2022 (Top Gun: Maverick), two of the buzziest films of 2023 (Anyone But You and Hit Man), and one of the biggest of 2024 (Twisters, #8 in box office for the year). Later this month he stars in the Hulu series Chad Powers, and in November he's in what could be another box office smash, Edgar Wright’s reboot of the Stephen King story 'The Running Man.'

What has made Powell truly today’s 'It' guy is not simply his onscreen success, but the immense amount of conversation he has generated. Endless think pieces have been written about him or been inspired by him. They cover topics as varied as Powell’s talent, his legitimacy as a star, and what his success says about Hollywood, but fundamentally they’re all circling the questions that Amanda Rozenboom addressed on Movieweb last summer: 'Where did Glen Powell Come From and Why is He Everywhere?' The first half of that is easily answered. As to why Glen Powell is suddenly everywhere, it’s a bit more complex.

Glen Powell, Hollywood Pinocchio

Glen Powell grew up in Austin, Texas, the son of an executive coach, after whom he is named, and a homemaker. As a kid he was an athlete and also an actor, performing in local theater and then making the leap to the big screen as a teenager in Spy Kids 3: Game Over. After a couple more roles he moved to Los Angeles. Then, two years later, the agent that had been his champion died, and—as pretty much every article about him loves to explore, Powell struggled for years in obscurity, before beginning to get bigger roles in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens and films like Everyone Wants Some!! or Hidden Figures. 

Analysis of the general press obsession with Powell’s 'lost years' could be a think piece of its own. Maybe it speaks to the overall homogenization of journalism today from a combination of the radical centralization of the media and the power of the Google search algorithm. But within many of these stories, there’s also a kind of mystified suspicion about Powell’s success, a sense that there’s something not quite right, something fabricated about him. “He looks like a capybara who made a wish to become human,” one commentator famously wrote on X. Similarly, Guy Lodge in The Guardian writes, “Glen Powell looks a little like a lot of people, as if a studio executive composed a movie-star identikit from portions of Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.” Journalist Anne Helen Petersen’s comments at the beginning of her Substack piece 'Unified Theory of Glen Powell' strike almost the same 'Hollywood’s Frankenstein' note: “Three weeks ago, I felt like Glen Powell had been manufactured in a lab to become the next Hollywood star. I didn’t like him, I didn’t get him. He seemed bland. Handsome, sure, but in a boring way.”

And in truth, for as handsome as he is, there is a strangeness to Powell’s face, a combination of polish and compressed angularity at certain angles that makes him seem ever so slightly rendered. He’s like the grandchild of ‘80s pop culture characters Max Headroom and the T-1000, now smooth and looking like a real boy, mostly. But every once in a while, you catch a glimpse.

Glen Powell, the internet's damsel in distress 

Many have written passionate pieces defending Powell’s honor.

“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," Sheila O’Malley argues near the beginning of her piece ‘Wherefore Glen Powell?’ “That’s it. This is how acting careers sometimes work. It’s not a mystery.” She then walks us through his entire career for almost 7000 words. 

Petersen likewise admits becoming fiercely committed to him after watching his films. “Glen Powell isn’t just being framed as a movie star,” she writes. “He is a fucking movie star — but you have to go to the fucking movies to understand it.”

She goes on to list the reasons why she feels this way, which include how great he looks in clothes and the fact that he genuinely seems to like women.

“Tom Cruise doesn’t like women,” Petersen insist, in a fascinating riff on male actors today: “Neither does Miles Teller. Channing Tatum likes women. So does Ryan Gosling. Brad Pitt used to like women but doesn’t anymore. Leonardo Di Caprio only likes them occasionally. Bradley Cooper doesn’t, George Clooney does. Matt Damon doesn’t, Ben Affleck only does in that one scene in the J.Lo documentary.” 

Petersen also argues that Powell is “in on the joke” about his own handsomeness, actively subverting his stardom any chance he gets. So in Inside Man, which he co-wrote and produced, he presents himself with a greasy almost comb-over and a general nerdiness which everyone finds lame. In Anyone But You his Prince Charming quality is undermined in Disneyesque fashion by characteristics like weak swimming techniques and fear of spiders. In Everybody Wants Some!! he’s both a genuine wisdom figure for some and an unwitting buffoon in his 80s ‘stache and outfits. Powell enjoys not taking himself too seriously, and that silliness feeds people’s affection for him.

Glen Powell, a canvas of you 

The occasional bad render notwithstanding, Powell’s movie star looks and comfort with himself are certainly important aspects of his success. But rewatching his films, what seems more central is the fact that he’s also in on the joke of his own perceived blandness and virtual-ity. Powell keeps choosing to play characters that others project things onto. In Twisters he seems to the heroine like a self-involved and self-inflating jerk, but he’s not at all. In Anyone But You his co-lead thinks he’s a misogynist pig, but once again, he’s actually not. Hit Man, which he co-wrote, is actually the story of a mild-mannered guy who sees himself as a canvas onto which the people can project all of their beliefs about hired assassins, so that he can help the police arrest them. His job, he says in the film, is “to complete the picture they’ve already drawn for themselves.” Powell could easily say the same of his work as an actor.

The fact that Powell’s new movie The Running Man is about a guy fleeing for his life while being watched on TV by an entire city of people, each reacting to him in their own ways, may be the purest expression yet of what it is to be Glen Powell. No matter what role he plays, Tom Cruise will always be Tom Cruise. We are always going to see him standing there (or more likely running very energetically). It's the same for Arnold Schwarzenegger, star of the original Running Man. 

Glen Powell meanwhile is anyone we want him to be—and not because he so deeply immerses himself in his characters that he vanishes before our eyes, but because he was never there to begin with. As though taking a note from the worlds of video games or Barbie dolls, Powell has turned himself into an avatar upon which everyone can project their feelings, wishes, and think pieces.

“There’s always been this phrase, ‘One for me, one for them,’” he said in Vanity Fair in November of his career plans. “I just completely disagree with that idea. I think it can be all for them, and it can be all for you.”

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