Who else but Glen Powell?

I just posted about Manny Jacinto and his popularity surge coming out of The Acolyte and how he knows he still has to fight for opportunities being a person of colour. 

Manny and Glen Powell are around-ish the same age. Both struggled for years in the industry, it wasn’t overnight for Glen either, fame only arrived in his 30s (and this would turn out to be a bonus, we’ll get to that in a minute) but where Manny is still cautious about his next moves, as Glen told The Hollywood Reporter a couple of months ago: 

“That’s the funniest part about this moment. I’ve worked really hard for a long time, putting things together and just trying to get them in shape enough for people to give a shit. Then finally you get to a place where people are just like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ and suddenly you’re playing musical chairs with yourself. You’re like, ‘Wait, do I sit in all these chairs right now?’” 

That’s the difference in the reality, and it’s important to be aware of it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to be, like, mad at Glen Powell. Especially since he’s not a dick about it. 

Glen is everywhere right now because Twisters opens tomorrow, expected to be a big blockbuster, continuing Glen’s win streak that started, sort of, with Top Gun: Maverick, and then really, really went big with Anyone But You. That’s a critical detail, by the way. And is something that Glen and Manny have in common. Manny has gone to the next level because people are thirsting over him – specifically girls, women, and gay men. And as Glen told THR in his cover story in May, it wasn’t the hyper masculinity of Top Gun: Maverick that elevated him up the fame scale. It was actually a rom-com that did that, and of course the audience that comes with it. 

Just like it was with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling and Robert Pattinson. Women make movie stars! So why are we undervalued as an audience?! 

That said, unlike Leo and Ryan and Robert, and unlike Jacob Elordi, who’s following his predecessors’ fame playbook and doing the whole cliché thing and running from his heartthrob status, literally playing Frankenstein’s monster in his next role, Glen Powell isn’t fronting like he’s not enjoying it. Which is a big reason why I enjoy him. As Jon Hamm said of him: 

“If you look up the definition of a movie star, it’s Glen. The smile, the hair, the tan, the muscles, and he wants it and he loves it and he’s good at it.”

The three key words there are “he wants it”. And he’s not ashamed of wanting it. It’s OK to want it! Which is why he’s out here with his cute little dog, setting thirst traps, unapologetically, and unabashedly having fun on this Twisters press tour, hustling his ass off to extend his streak after Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, and Hit Man which he co-wrote and co-produced. 

He’s also writing and producing a Broadway musical, and co-writing a series for Hulu about a college football quarterback. And he’s working with Edgar Wright on a new adaptation of The Running Man and doing a reboot of Heaven Can Wait. He’s established himself as an actor but also a producer and a writer. This is impressive – but what I appreciate is that he’s not throwing that in people’s faces as validation, all like “I’m not just my muscles and my movie star smile, I can write too, OK?” If we just want to know him as a heartthrob, we are welcome to, he’s not so insecure about that that he has to insist that he's “more”. 

Maybe that’s what comes from hitting it in your 30s instead of her 20s, when you’ve experienced some failure, when you know how hard it was. And it’s not like Glen Powell had it easy. He was missing out on a lot of roles in his 20s. He f-cked up several auditions. He watched many of his peers make it well before he did. And finally it’s happened for him. So he’s choosing this moment to ….move home to Texas. 

These have been the headlines lately and he just did a new interview with IndieWire about how it’s better for him to be close to family and the people who know him right now, at his most famous, and also finish his degree, while he’s sitting in so many chairs. Apparently he’ll be studying while filming in the fall and he’ll have to get back to Austin three times over the course of production to take exams. 

Clearly Glen Powell doesn’t need post-secondary education at this point in his career, but maybe he does NEED it to grow, both as an actor, producer, writer, and as a person. 

So to go back to the title of this post, even though it’s early, only July, and even though they haven’t had a person of colour in position for three years, isn’t this the obvious PEOPLE Magazine Sexiest Man Alive? Glen Powell now meets all the criteria, he would definitely not say no, he'd give up an exclusive interview and photo shoot, he’s coming off back-to-back-to-back scores. It’s just a matter of if he can fit it in his schedule. 

And hosting Saturday Night Live is definitely on the bingo card too. He talks about this with IndieWire, how he was supposed to host a few years ago but then Top Gun got pushed. But, probably, he’s getting the call sooner rather than later.