Texas Heat, Hollywood Cool: The Rise of Glen Powell

PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN PFLUGER / AUGUST

Glen Powell has the polish of a studio idol and the comedic reflexes of a short-order cook at rush hour—grinning while juggling six skillets, never singeing the sole meunière. Hollywood, which still believes it can engineer charisma like a soundstage sunrise, keeps discovering that Powell arrives with his own generator.

His curriculum vitae reads like a set designer’s sketchbook: the cocky aviator in Top Gun: Maverick; the raffish romantic conspirator in Anyone But You; the tornado-flirting cowboy in Twisters with his collar open to the prairie wind; and—most revealingly—the slippery, brainy, mercurial chameleon in Hit Man, the Linklater lark that turned into a meditation on desire, disguise, and the pleasure of pretending. Somewhere between storm clouds and screwball noir, the consensus cr...