Everything’s currently coming up Glen Powell—but as far as he’s concerned, he’s standing on the backs of actors before him.
In GQ’s latest cover story, the Running Man actor talked a lot about the stars who helped him breakout, even indirectly. Chief among them, according to Powell at least, is Chris Pratt as Star-Lord in the first Guardians in the Galaxy. It can be easy to forget, but the transformation from Andy to Peter Quill was a big deal back in the 2010s, and Powell credits Powell with allowing leading male roles to lighten up a little and have some more fun—especially after years of the likes of Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson’s more serious, broody roles.
“When Pratt kind of appeared on the scene where he was doing things that were a little more silly and buoyant, that’s where I feel most at home,” Powell told GQ. “And that’s where I feel like I had a gear that is a necessary flavor in terms of Hollywood, and not a gear that a lot of guys can play.”
Powell’s Mission: Impossible costar Tom Cruise also weighed in on the actor’s trajectory to GQ, with Powell making extremely clear that he hoped to emulate Cruise’s trajectory. Cruise apparently convinced Powell to play Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick after Powell lost the co-lead role to Miles Teller. In Cruise’s telling, he advised Powell to “really look at [Hangman] and evaluate it from every angle. [I wanted him to] gather all the information on the process of how I approach making movies, my career, all the talented artists that were involved, and how the film is actually going to be made.”
And when the time came for Powell’s new film Running Man, it was Cruise who apparently helped Powell prepare for doing the film’s major stunts and live up physically to the novel’s descriptions of Ben Richards. Powell recalled “putting on a lot of muscle for this, and a lot of it was functional so I could absorb hits. But a lot of it was also authentically for an audience. I went from going, ‘Oh, I’m an actor on a movie,’ to ‘I’m a high-performance athlete,'” Powell said. “And I’m just very lucky that I have someone like Tom who I could literally go, ‘Hey, what do I do to survive something?'”
Running Man hits theaters November 14, with Glen Powell doing most of his own stunts—for more on that film and Powell’s other projects, you can read the GQ story here.