Shortly after the release of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, Glen Powell was invited by Tom Cruise to Los Angeles to attend what the star described as his private film school. In Maverick, Powell had played one of Cruise’s trainees – the grinning, co*cksure Hangman – and assumed he was in for an afternoon of networking and workshops, with a group of other up-and-coming actors.
How wrong he was. The venue was an empty cinema, Powell was shown to his seat, and then the presentation began: Cruise on screen, intense and enormous, imparting a lifetime’s wisdom on every aspect of cinema (and semi-related subjects, such as how aeroplanes work) to his audience of one. For six hours.
It sounds less like a seminar than a passing of the torch: the last surviving old-school movie star in Hollywood trying to stave off the extinction of his kind. Although Powell would never describe himself as the next Cruise – “Tom’s position in this business is unparalleled, unmatchable, unique,” the 35-year-old Texan tells me, over Zoom from Cape Town – after 21 years in the business, he is having something of a moment; one that, like Cruise’s own career, flies in the face of received Hollywood wisdom. After Maverick, Powell turned down the lead role in the forthcoming Jurassic Park film to make – and make huge successes of – Hit Man and Anyone But You, a raunchy comic thriller and a romantic comedy respectively, two of the most unfashionable genres around.
He neither sounds off on politics nor indulges in social-media activism, and could even be described as – eek! – patriotic. On July 4, he shared a beaming Instagram clip of himself flying with the US Navy’s Blue Angels stunt team, complete with stars-and-stripes emoji and music by Bruce Springsteen. He is athletic, clean-cut and cosily handsome, with a bright smile and purposeful nose: a 2020s leading man made in a 1990s mould.
Next week, Powell’s 1990s vibe further intensifies with the release of Twisters, a notional sequel to (but really just a second crack at) 1996’s Twister – the summer hit about storm-chasers in America’s Tornado Alley. Cruise himself clearly approves of the job: not only did he turn up to Monday’s London premiere, but he watched the film sitting right beside his protégé, clapping a proud hand on his shoulder as the credits rolled.
Powell, who grew up in Austin, was eight years old when he saw Twister, and remembers being bewitched “by this enormous movie that looked and felt like it had been shot in my back yard”. But it was only after being cast in the new version that he realised the original had been such an enormous global hit: until Harry Potter came along, it was the highest-grossing film Warner Bros had ever released. Powell treasures the big studio films of that era – “Jurassic Park, Independence Day, it was when summer blockbusters were at their best” – and says he wants to make “the same sort of movies with staying power, that tell stories about ordinary humans facing extraordinary odds”.
Happily, Twisters more than measures up to the Powell standard. It’s a dream summer film, wildly exciting and involving, and perhaps the most tightly built of its type since Top Gun: Maverick. Powell raves about his director, Lee Isaac Chung, an Arkansas native whose semi-autobiographical drama Minari was an Oscar-season frontrunner in 2021. It was Chung, he explains, who fought to shoot the film on location in Oklahoma, in order to capture the texture of heartland American life and land.
“You’d get to the coffee shop in the morning with these dark clouds gathering overhead and the woman at the counter would say, ‘Ooh, we got some weath-uh comin’ in,” Powell chuckles. “That stuff can’t help but get into the film’s DNA.”
Powell plays Tyler Owens, a charismatic YouTuber whose love of tornado-chasing inspires Kate Cooper, a traumatised meteorologist played by Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones, to get back into the field. The film features more than its share of spectacular storms – at one point, a vortex rips through an oil refinery – but at its heart is the romance between Tyler and Kate.
Chemistry is a Powell strong suit. In Anyone But You, he and his co-star, Sydney Sweeney, flirt at an Olympian level – the pair were erroneously reported to have become an item during filming – while in Hit Man, he and Adria Arjona steamed up the screen. His approach is methodical – and disarmingly sweet.
“What’s the thing we always say about love?” he grins. “It’s that it’s how people complete each other, right? So you just have to figure out what your co-star’s character is missing, what the thing is that she wants and needs, and then embody that.”
In Twisters, Kate’s missing puzzle piece was passion for her work: enter Powell in his homemade storm-chaser truck, with an arsenal of fireworks rigged in the back. He drew further inspiration from the 2022 documentary Fire of Love, about two married volcanologists, “who shared this drive to get as close as they could to the thing they both loved, even if it could hurt them. Like, who would those two people have been without each other?”
Powell’s zeal for this stuff is infectious, though Hollywood hasn’t always shared it. Hit Man, a critical hit at Venice, which topped Netflix’s films chart in its week of release, only ended up at the streamer because none of the older studios would touch it. And Anyone But You, an irresistible modern-day riff on Much Ado About Nothing, which made back 10 times its budget in cinemas, seemed to be treated as a turkey-in-waiting by Sony Pictures, which declined to even screen it for critics.
On this, Powell sounds both stung and vindicated. “One of the things that I’ve realised recently is that when studios say a genre is dead, all it means is that there’s a huge opportunity, because a market is not being served. The business stopped making romantic comedies, apparently, because romantic comedies weren’t making any money in theatres. But my belief is there’s no problem facing Hollywood that can’t be solved by a really good movie.”
In a similar way, he feels that Twisters was made for an audience Hollywood now habitually overlooks. “Having grown up in and around Texas, I’m aware there are vast parts of America that have been underserved in terms of movies that they want to see,” he says. “You sort of have New York and Los Angeles making the decisions about what gets made, but there’s a whole lot more audience out there you need to think about.”
Powell admits unease about the recent creep of what might be described as progressive moral signalling into Hollywood’s output: “First and foremost, because if you’re telling people what to think, you’re not allowing them to feel. You can’t put people into that heightened state if they’re thinking, ‘Hmm, do I or do I not agree with this message?’”
Certainly, it’s easy to imagine an alternate version of Twisters that plays like a $200-million climate-change polemic. “Of course, you might want to have conversations about those other things later,” says Powell, “but that’s not what our movie is about. It’s man and woman versus nature; finding out who we really are in the face of the storm.”
That Powell is at odds with his times is nothing new. His screen career began at the age of 13, with a minor role in the Austin-shot Spy Kids 3D – and while at high school, his mother, Cyndy, a former staffer at the Reagan White House, drove him 300 miles to audition for Denzel Washington. That got him a small part in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, and a celebrated agent in Ed Limato, who had shaped the careers of Washington, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and Steve Martin.
But the box-office success of Twilight (2008) had made sullen emo types the flavour of the month, and the only growth industry in town – franchises – was one that Limato had warned Powell to avoid at all costs. Limato died in 2010, when Powell was 21, and for a while he represented himself, with limited success.
“I was losing battery power,” he says, “making 100, 300 bucks on a movie, just enough to survive.” His lowest ebb came during a “rough shoot” for a comedy called Sex Ed, in Florida: he came close to giving up, but had one last audition on his to-do list: a self-tape for The Expendables 3. He hung up the bedsheet in his room at the Holiday Inn, filmed himself in front of it playing the scene, and then heard a short while later that Sylvester Stallone had put him in the final three.
He obtained Stallone’s email address from a friend at his production company, “and I wrote him a letter, telling him that nobody would work harder or give him a better performance. Then when I was visiting my parents a few weeks later, my phone rang and Sly was on the other end, growling ‘Welcome to Expendables’. That was a moment that really taught me that in this business you have to fight for the career that you want.”
On the evening we speak, Powell is one day away from finishing his next film, a satirical comic thriller called Huntington, which sounds like a mix of Saltburn and Kind Hearts and Coronets. After that, it’s on to The Running Man, with Edgar Wright: not a remake of the 1987 muscle-rippling Arnie classic, but a more faithful adaptation of the Stephen King novel that inspired it.
“We’re taking a much leaner, meaner, more John McClane approach,” he says, name-checking Bruce Willis’s resolute police detective from Die Hard. “A normal blue-collar guy against the scariest odds imaginable.” That means his workout regime “will not be geared towards achieving the Schwarzenegger aesthetic. It’s more about ensuring I can take as many hits as is humanly possible. I’m going to be putting my body through some pretty brutal stuff, stunt-wise.”
Hmm. Something about this approach sounds familiar. The battery on Powell’s tablet is low, so he has moved it from the kitchen table to the charging point by the sofa. He is now mostly in silhouette, and the nose, the baseball cap, the jawline, all bring a certain A-list mentor to mind.
“This is the thing I love about making movies,” he enthuses. “You’re surrounded by professionals whose job it is to put me through hell while keeping me safe. I get to learn what I’m capable of, figure out how we can push the limits, become the most lethal human being I can be.”
In the fading Cape Town sun, he flashes a Cruisean grin, and I find myself wondering if the species just might survive.
Twisters is released in UK cinemas on July 17
