"I'm fine now, my personal life is part of the fun"

Just like the fun cut-up he plays in “Everybody Wants Some!!” by Richard Linklater, Glenn Powell likes to have a good time. When he began his career, he was eager to present himself in a way that made him attractive to some, but excluded to others. In a recent article in Vanity Fair, Powell talked about his early days in Hollywood and how things have changed over the past two years with hits like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Anyone But You” and new approaching blockbusters like “Twisters”. .”

“I come from that college party mentality where there are no boundaries,” Powell said of his acclimation to Hollywood culture. “No one gives a shit about you in Hollywood if you can’t give them something.”

More from IndieWire

For the longest time, Powell wasn’t sure what he could offer people other than his optimistic personality and natural charisma, traits that didn’t seem to do the trick at first.

“I’ve probably been told more than anyone else, ‘You’ll never make it in this town,'” Powell said. “The chances are so slim that people will hand this quote out like candy.”

The fact is that these people would end up being wrong. After years in small roles, Powell is now a household name and the dynamic change that has been created for him is drastic. His face is so famous that he recently decided to leave Los Angeles and move to Texas, where he grew up. Not that he is less well known there either.

“I literally felt like a commodity for the first time,” Powell said of realizing his star had officially risen. “I started thinking, ‘This could be a problem.'”

To solve this problem, Powell seems to have compartmentalized his public persona and who he really is. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he said: “It’s almost like creating a wrestler’s alter ego. It’s like you’re Bruce Wayne and Batman. No one has the full picture, so you have to accept that they don’t have the full picture. It’s entertainment. I’m okay now with my personal life being part of the entertainment.

One example is the recent social media campaign for his and Sydney Sweeney’s hit romantic comedy, “Anyone But You.” To energize the outing, the two actors decided to intensify their dynamic, making it seem like real sparks were able to fly between the two.

“We looked at the chemistry, we looked at the fun,” he said. “We leaned into all of that – and the film benefited from it. The fun part with Syd was figuring out what was going to be loud and tacky. People talk about TikTok as something that cannibalizes movie theaters, and what we’ve seen is that they feed off each other: it becomes more eventful and more fun. Glen, the person, wouldn’t have been comfortable with this a year and a half ago. Now I can put myself in a different place and be a character.

The best of IndieWire