1988-present
Latest News: Glen Powell Stars in Twisters
Glen Powell drew from a harrowing personal experience to prepare for his role in the upcoming summer blockbuster Twisters. In an interview with Total Film, the 35-year-old detailed his own tornado scare while growing up in Texas.
“It was an F5—one of the big ones,” Powell said of the storm, which struck the small city of Jarrell as he and his family were driving nearby. “I was outrunning it with my aunt Taffy and a car full of cousins. And I remember us having to take shelter. It didn’t get close enough to do any damage to us, but I remember the fear of being on the road when, you know, the biggest imaginable one was kind of coming through.”
Instead of escaping the powerful storms, Powell will confront them head-on in the new movie as fictional storm chaser Tyler Owens. Also starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, Twisters is scheduled to roar into theaters on July 19.
Who Is Glen Powell?
Actor Glen Powell is best known for his roles in the action movie Top Gun: Maverick and the romantic comedy Anyone But You. Raised in Austin, Texas, Powell began his career in childhood as a stage performer and picked up his first movie role as a teenager in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over in 2003. After primarily earning minor supporting parts over the next decade, he started to gain wide recognition with the TV horror comedy Scream Queens and his portrayal of astronaut John Glenn in the 2016 biographical drama Hidden Figures. He is now considered one of Hollywood’s up-and-coming leading men.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Glen Thomas Powell Jr.
BORN: October 21, 1988
BIRTHPLACE: Austin, Texas
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra
Early Life and Parents
Glen Thomas Powell Jr. was born on October 21, 1988, and raised in the capital city of Austin, Texas. His parents are Glen Powell Sr., a former executive coach, and Cyndy Powell, who was a stay-at-home parent to Glen and his two siblings. The actor has an older sister, Lauren, and a younger sister, Leslie.
Powell showed an interest in movies and acting from an early age largely because of his parents. When he was 5, his father took him to see director Steven Spielberg’s megahit Jurassic Park in the summer of 1993. The younger Glen watched the movie multiple times in theaters and again on home video, trying to figure out the secrets of the film’s special effects.
According to Austin Monthly, Glen began making his own science fiction films in childhood. He used a home video camera and computer, recruited his friends to be actors, and searched for props in his family’s basement. Seeing this, his parents encouraged him to enroll in acting classes. A member of the Austin Musical Theater program, Glen earned a role as an understudy for the male lead in The Music Man in 2000 and also appeared in productions of The Sound of Music and Oliver! at the city’s Paramount Theater.
Even today, Glen Sr. and Cyndy maintain an active role in their son’s life and career and have made cameos in a number of his films. Most recently, they appeared as a beachgoing couple in the 2022 war drama Devotion and a pair of airline passengers in the 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. “Your parents are your wingmen on this journey, and I have the best wingmen alive,” the actor said.
Although he was already on the fast track as a screen actor, Powell continued his education at Westwood High School in Texas, where he played football and lacrosse before graduating in 2007. He later studied radio, TV, and film at the University of Texas at Austin but didn’t complete his degree.
Movies: Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You
Powell’s location in Austin helped him land his first onscreen role as a “Long-fingered Boy” in the 2003 children’s adventure sequel Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, which was filmed and produced in the city. Director Robert Rodriguez discovered Powell, then 14, while looking for “local hires” to accompany the primarily Los Angeles-based cast. “You’re just trying to find someone locally that won’t get nervous, that’ll give a performance that kind of measures up to the other actors. He walks in with a stature and confidence and just nails it,” Rodriguez told IndieWire. “So now, it’s no surprise to see [he made it as an actor], but he already had that quality at 14 and clarity of vision that that’s what he was supposed to be.”
The young actor—then credited as Glen Powell Jr.—regularly earned minor roles in lesser-known movies such as The Wendell Baker Story (2005), Fast Food Nation (2006), and The Hottest State (2006) over the next few years.
Still in high school at Westwood, Powell even considered deprioritizing his acting career until receiving a pep talk from Denzel Washington on the set of the 2007 historical drama The Great Debaters. In the movie, Powell played Harvard University student Preston Whittington and impressed the two-time Oscar winner. “Denzel Washington really pushed me out of the nest a bit and said, ‘You should double-down on yourself. You should give [acting] a shot,’” Powell said on Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist.
Rising Star: The Dark Knight Rises and Hidden Figures
Powell took Washington’s advice and gradually began appearing in more prominent titles, including the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 as an unnamed Gotham Stock Exchange trader. Powell then moved onto the ensemble movie The Expendables 3 in 2014, appearing alongside action stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Two years later in 2016, Powell played astronaut John Glenn in the historical drama Hidden Figures, about NASA’s Black women pioneers Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Johnson Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Upon viewing a rough cut of the film with unfinished special effects, the actor was critical of his performance: “I just remember being like, ‘I ruined this beautiful movie, the legacy of these amazing women,’” he explained in an interview for Variety. Luckily, critics and viewers seemed to disagree—the movie made more than $230 million at the box office and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Powell took a detour into comedy for his next roles, including the teen movie Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) and the Netflix rom-com Set It Up (2018). The stage was set for the actor to fully establish his leading man potential.
Top Gun: Maverick
After a four-year absence from the silver screen that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell returned in a big way in 2022 via three movies: the war drama Devotion, the Netflix animated comedy Apollo 10½ : A Space Age Childhood, and Top Gun: Maverick. The latter—a sequel to the 1986 vehicle starring Tom Cruise—became the biggest movie of the year, grossing nearly $1.5 billion at the global box office, and gave Powell more exposure than any of his previous projects.
The actor played Jake “Hangman” Seresin, a pompous naval aviator trained by Cruise’s titular pilot. Powell originally auditioned for, and failed to earn, the role of primary supporting character Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (played by Miles Teller) but stayed on the project after Cruise called him personally and praised his audition.
Powell underwent extensive training for the film, including underwater escape simulations and flights in F-18 aircraft to prepare for the G-forces he would experience on camera. Cruise even paid for the actor to complete flight school as a Christmas present, allowing Powell to earn his pilot’s license.
Even with Cruise’s support and direction as an executive producer of the movie, Powell initially didn’t like Seresin’s arrogant persona and compared him to antagonist Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies. Instead, “Hangman” became one of Top Gun: Maverick’s most memorable figures. “It was a leap of faith. In hindsight, I’m like, God, I can’t imagine if I missed out on this one, but it wasn’t so obvious,” he said.
Anyone But You
In 2023, Powell was part of another big hit with the romantic comedy Anyone But You, a modern reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. He and Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney shared plenty of onscreen chemistry as singles pretending to be a couple at a destination wedding. The movie became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy domestically in eight years.
Powell is poised to continue his career momentum in 2024. His action film Hit Man debuts on Netflix June 7 (with Powell also serving as one of the movie’s writers and producers), and he stars as storm chaser Tyler Owens in the disaster movie Twisters coming to theaters July 19. Netflix also purchased the rights to the legal drama Monsanto for more than $30 million, with Powell reportedly to star alongside Anthony Mackie and Laura Dern.
Scream Queens and Other TV Shows
In addition to his array of movie roles, Powell has acted on a variety of notable television dramas throughout his career. After his first small part on The WB’s Jack & Bobby in 2004, he appeared in episodes of Without a Trace, CSI: Miami, Rizzoli & Isles, and NCIS between 2008 and 2012.
He achieved much greater renown with his first reoccurring role, on the Fox horror comedy Scream Queens in 2015 and 2016. Powell played Wallace University fraternity brother Chad Radwell across 16 episodes of the TV show, a humorous spoof of 1970s and ’80s slasher movies. “The amount of people that come up to me about Scream Queens is shocking, probably more than anything else I’ve ever done,” he told Deadline in December 2023. “Maybe it ages like a fine wine.”
Powell has since had voice roles on the Netflix cartoon Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, from 2020 to 2022, and a 2023 episode of the animated series Rick and Morty.
Relationship History
Powell is currently single and has never married. Most recently, the actor dated model Gigi Paris for about three years, starting in 2020. They made multiple public appearances together, including at the 2022 premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. However, People reported in April 2023 the couple had “broken up several times” and decided to end their relationship for good.
Following their onscreen sparks in Anyone But You, fans began speculating that Powell and co-star Sydney Sweeney had begun a real-life relationship, coinciding with his split form Paris. Although the actors have said this isn’t true, they admitted to playing along with the gossip to help market the movie. Powell even made a cameo during Sweeney’s monologue as host of Saturday Night Live in March 2024 to poke fun at the rumors.
“Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry. That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit—and it worked wonderfully,” Powell told The New York Times.
Powell was also romantically linked to actor Nina Dobrev in 2017 and Australian TV host Renee Bargh from 2018 through 2019.
Net Worth
Although Powell’s actual net worth hasn’t been made public, Life & Style magazine reported in May 2024 the actor’s fortune is estimated to be between $7 million and $10 million.
The true number is likely higher after the release of Anyone But You, with Powell reportedly receiving $5 million for his role in the movie.
Quotes
- In my own life, being an actor is a little bit of an identity crisis on its own. You have to be everything to everybody. You have to occupy all these different identities to succeed.
- I always liked masculine characters that took a punch, got back up, would bleed, and still fight.
- Anyone that knows me for five minutes knows I’m a Texan. I love Texas so much. I love Texans.
- I’m never doing a movie where I’m shirtless again. I’m over this s—. I’m ready to put my clothes on and not do push-ups before takes. I’m ready to act.
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Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.
