Now that Powell has found a measure of success, he is equally honest about his excitement about that. “This is cool,” he told me. (Glen Powell loves the word cool.) “I have wanted to do this since I was a kid, and it’s awesome.” Earlier this year, Powell said, he was in London, visiting the set of a movie that Tom Cruise was making with the director Alejandro González Iñárritu. It was the day the director David Lynch passed away, and Powell watched as Cruise and Iñárritu gathered everyone for a moment of silence. “And they talked about his career. It was right before the shooting day started. And they said, ‘Can we talk about what an amazing guy this guy was, and what he created for filmmaking? We’re about to get the honor of making a movie, let’s talk about the guy.’ I was like, What a cool thing.”
Powell said that Josh Brolin, his costar in The Running Man, would often do something similar, taking a moment to remind those around him that they are lucky to do what they do. “I think it’s really cool when people I like and respect are really hitting the Pause button, and being like: This is amazing. I just want you to take that in. When a movie star does that—when somebody of that level presses Pause and says: Hey, this is awesome. Just remember: This is awesome.”
Brolin told a story about Powell getting ready for a scene they were doing together. “Glen is sitting there over and over, slamming his fist down on his thigh, and I’m like, ‘Goddamn, let up on yourself, dude.’ But: into it! Works himself into a state. And that can be embarrassing.” At a glance, something like The Running Man, Brolin said, could seem superficial—nothing to get worked up over. “You’re like, ‘Hey, man, it’s The Running Man, relax.’ You know? ‘It’s Big Top Pee-wee, it’s okay.’ And it’s not that. And he refuses to do that. And I don’t care if you’re cold plunging every morning, I don’t care what it is. I just want to see you doing it. I just want to see you proving to yourself that you’re there for real.”
One morning in Glasgow, Powell and his driver picked me up from my hotel. On our way to breakfast, we passed more locations for the J.J. Abrams film Powell was currently shooting. Powell said he had recently been negotiating with his home state to make it more possible for productions to shoot there. “There’s a few things in the deal points that I’m trying to get amended a bit, but Texas just passed a massive film incentive,” he said.
I asked Powell if he had elected himself to this role as Hollywood ambassador to the state, or whether he’d been asked to help. “I went to the Capitol when, probably when I was 17, 16, to talk about the incentives.” But, he said, “It is only now that I feel like I’m sort of one of the maybe four or five people that represent Texas in Hollywood that they’ve sort of been like, ‘Hey, we need you. It’s you. McConaughey, Woody, Owen.’ There’s not that many of ’em.”
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