Much like the fun-loving cut-up he plays in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!,” Glenn Powell likes to have an excellent time. When he began his profession, he was keen to place himself on the market in ways in which made him engaging to some, however an outcast to others. In a recent profile in Vanity Fair, Powell spoke of his early days in Hollywood and how things have shifted in the last year or two with hits like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Anyone But You” and new blockbusters on strategy like “Twisters.”
“I came from that college-party mentality where there are no boundaries,” Powell mentioned of acclimating to Hollywood tradition. “Nobody gives a fuck about you in Hollywood if you can’t offer them something.”
For the longest time, Powell wasn’t certain what he might provide folks apart from his upbeat character and pure charisma, options that didn’t appear to be doing the trick at first.
“I’ve probably been told, ‘You’ll never make it in this town’ more than any individual alive,” mentioned Powell. “The odds are so slim that people hand that quote out like candy.”
The factor is, these folks would find yourself being flawed. After years in bit elements, Powell is now a family identify and the dynamic shift that’s created for him is drastic. His face is so well-known that he determined to go away Los Angeles lately and make a house for himself again in Texas the place he grew up. Not that he’s any much less recognized there both.
“I literally felt like a commodity for the first time,” mentioned Powell of realizing when his star formally rose. “I started to think, ‘This may be a problem.’”
To take care of this drawback, Powell appears to have compartmentalized his public persona and who he truly is. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he mentioned, “It’s almost like creating a wrestler alter ego. It’s like you’re Bruce Wayne and Batman. Nobody has the full picture, so you have to be okay with them not having a full picture. It’s entertainment. I’m OK now with my personal life being part of the entertainment.”
One instance of this was the current social media push for his and Sydney Sweeney’s hit rom-com “Anyone But You.” To hype up the discharge, the two actors decided to play up their dynamic, making it look like precise sparks might have been flying between the 2.
“We leaned into the chemistry, we leaned into the fun,” he mentioned. “We leaned into all of it — and the movie benefited. The fun part with Syd was figuring out what’s going to be noisy and sticky. People talk about TikTok as a thing that is cannibalizing the theaters, and what we saw is that they feed into each other: It becomes more eventized and more fun. Glen, the person, would not have been comfortable with that a year and a half ago. Now I can put myself in a different place and be a character.”