Glen Powell

Glen Thomas Powell Jr. (born October 21, 1988) is an American actor. He began his career with small roles on television and in films including Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003) and Fast Food Nation (2006). Powell acted in the action film The Expendables 3 (2014), the comedy-horror series Scream Queens (2015–2016), the teen comedy Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), the historical romance The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) and the romantic comedy Set It Up (2018). He also portrayed astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures (2016) and aviator Tom Hudner in Devotion (2022). He is the co-creator, producer and star of the comedy series, Chad Powers (2025).

Powell became widely known with his role in the action film Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and the romantic comedy Anyone but You (2023). He went on to star in the dark comedy Hit Man (2023), which he also co-wrote and produced, the disaster film Twisters (2024) and the action film The Running Man (2025). His performance in Hit Man earned him a nomination for a Golden Globe Award.

Glen Thomas Powell Jr. was born on October 21, 1988, in Austin, Texas, to Glen Powell Sr., an executive coach and Cyndy, a homemaker; he has two sisters. His father is of Polish and Lipka Tatar ancestry and his original surname was “Chutsky”. Powell graduated from Westwood High School in Austin, Texas in 2007, where he played football and lacrosse. He attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT) for one year, calling it "the greatest year of [his] entire life", but dropped out and did not finish his degree. He initially expected to complete the requirements in spring 2024, then pushed to spring 2025, but since his schedule limited his time commitments, he put off his goal to spring 2027. As of November 2025, he was enrolled in UT's Radio-Television-Film program and is taking classes over Zoom.

Powell's acting career began while working with Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. In 2007, before his first year of college, Powell landed a role in The Great Debaters, directed by and starring Denzel Washington. Washington introduced him to agent Ed Limato, who encouraged Powell to move to Los Angeles. After moving to the city, Powell stayed with a friend of the family and he later described struggling during this period to get roles, including failed auditions for Friday Night Lights, Cowboys & Aliens, and The Longest Ride. However, he saw some success with small credits in television series, including Into the West, Jack & Bobby, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Without a Trace, Rizzoli & Isles and The Lying Game. He also had minor parts in The Dark Knight Rises and Stuck in Love. Powell stated that he auditioned multiple times for the role in The Dark Knight Rises and that Christopher Nolan taking a chance on him was a validation as "nothing was going on" in his life at the time.

Powell began receiving larger roles in feature films around 2014. He played a hacker in The Expendables 3, an action movie that starred several well-known stars and that reunited Powell with Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. Powell later recounted asking Stallone for advice while filming on how to succeed in Hollywood. Powell next took minor roles in the comedies Sex Ed and Ride Along 2. During this period, he also had a main role in the first season of the television show Scream Queens and a recurring role in the second season.

In March 2016, he co-starred as Finnegan in Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater's spiritual sequel to Dazed & Confused, which was filmed in Austin, Texas and released by Paramount. The film was noted for being one of the first movies to really showcase Powell, with Linklater stating: "I needed someone with some charisma who was going to be smart, who was also believable as a college athlete... (He appeared) like this Beat character—he was even reading The Subterraneans, I think." Later that year, Powell played astronaut John Glenn in the biographical drama Hidden Figures. In 2017, he had a minor role as Sergeant Dylan Chutsky in the Netflix film Sand Castle. He then starred in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018).

In 2018, Powell starred opposite Zoey Deutch in the romantic comedy Set It Up. The movie was released on Netflix. Powell reflected in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he started getting more calls from contacts in the film industry after the movie's release, and Jake Greenburg of The Guardian commented that it was the "first movie wise enough to let [Powell] take up real space". Later that year, Powell joined the cast of Top Gun: Maverick. He had initially auditioned for the role of Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, but the part went to Miles Teller. Powell's audition impressed producers, who offered him the role of Jake "Hangman" Seresin instead but Powell was reluctant to take the role because he viewed the character as underdeveloped. A call from Tom Cruise, the star of the film, convinced Powell to accept the part, with Cruise offering him greater control over the character. The film was delayed multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it turned into a "breakout role" for Powell upon its release in May 2022.

Powell next worked as a voice actor in the animated film Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood, which premiered in March 2022 in his second collaboration with Linklater. He then played naval officer Tom Hudner in the biographical war film, Devotion. The film, which Powell executive produced, received positive reviews when released in November 2022, but it was a box-office bomb.