Glen Powell’s ‘Really Surreal’ 2024 Ride to Stardom

On December 26, 2024By Littum

**SCHOOL SPIRIT** “I get to work with these great filmmakers, and great filmmakers surround themselves with great department heads,” says Glen Powell of how he tries to absorb knowledge on set. “It’s just film school to me.” (Presley Ann/Getty Images for Netflix)

So, Glen Powellhow has your year been

It was a fun thing to get to ask this very literal question of Powell on this week’s show Prestige junkie podcast, calling in from his London kitchen on a day off from set Edgar Wright‘s upcoming remake of The Running Man. Powell got a lead in 2024 and opened the rom-com Everyone but you during the holidays last year, and then never slowed down, leading to this summer’s blockbuster Twisters as well as the clever, incredibly funny comedy Hit Manwhich he also wrote together with the director Richard Linklater.

“It’s been a really surreal one,” Powell admits, with the kind of Texan understatement that has helped him as a bona fide movie star. “You just never know how far this journey will take you, but it’s taking me a lot further than I thought. It’s pretty cool.”

Powell, 36, is quick to correct anyone who might call him an overnight success. His first film role was in a Linklater film, a small part in the 2006s Fast Food Nationbut he followed that with almost a decade of working in obscurity, taking small roles in films such as The Dark Knight Rises and The Expenses 3 and tried to learn from big stars while watching them work. Breaking out as a star in his thirties means he comes with a healthy sense of what he wants out of this business—and what the company might want out of him.

“This job is kind of split into two parts: You have to outwork everyone and be tenacious, and yet you also have to let go and realize that this is a marathon, not a sprint,” Powell says. “If you really want to survive in this business, you treat people well, you work hard, but you also know that there are going to be wins and losses. It’s a big sine wave. The faster the ascent, the faster the descent. You have to to trust the kind of ebb and flow of it all.”

**CAREER BOOM** Powell, right, opposite *Hit Man* co-star Adria Arjona and director and co-writer Richard Linklater. (Brian Roedel/Netflix)

Hit Man is based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article about a real man who posed as an assassin on behalf of the police. Linklater and Powell added humor to the story and a romance between Powell’s character and a woman (Adria Arjona) who tries to hire him to kill her husband. They made the film independently before it was bought by Netflix after its festival premiere in fall 2023, but getting to that point wasn’t easy. When potential investors heard their pitch, Powell says, “They saw potential, and then they wanted to turn it into something else.”

Powell and Linklater looked at each other, wondering the were the crazy ones who thought they had something good and decided to go with their gut — another thing Powell has learned to trust after nearly 20 years in the business — and make the movie they wanted to make. “It’s one thing I take with me in terms of my career,” Powell says Hit Man experience. “It’s just, do i want to see this movie? And if I want to see this movie, if I’m jazzed about it, there’s obviously an audience for it somewhere.”