Glen Powell: From Texas Roots to Hollywood Star

Glen Powell has rapidly ascended the ranks of Hollywood, captivating audiences with his charm and versatility. His journey, however, began far from the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles. This article explores Powell's early life, education, and the experiences that shaped him into the actor he is today.

Early Life and Family

Glen Thomas Powell Jr. was born on October 21, 1988, in Austin, Texas. His parents are Glen Powell Sr., an executive coach, and Cyndy Powell, a homemaker. He has two sisters: an older sister, Lauren, and a younger sister, Leslie. Glen's father is of Polish and Lipka Tatar ancestry, and his original family surname was "Chutsky."

Powell's upbringing in Austin played a significant role in fostering his early interests. From a young age, he was fascinated by film. His father taking him to see Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 ignited a passion for movies and special effects. He watched the film repeatedly, trying to understand the magic behind the scenes.

Glen began making his own science fiction films in childhood, using a home video camera and computer, recruiting his friends to be actors, and searching for props in his family’s basement. Seeing this, his parents encouraged him to enroll in acting classes. He participated in the Austin Musical Theater program, earning a role as an understudy for the male lead in The Music Man in 2000 and also appeared in productions of The Sound of Music and Oliver! at the city’s Paramount Theater.

His parents have remained actively involved in his life and career, even making cameos in several of his films. Most recently, they appeared as a beachgoing couple in the 2022 war drama Devotion and a pair of airline passengers in the 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. “Your parents are your wingmen on this journey, and I have the best wingmen alive,” the actor said.

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Education and High School Years

Powell graduated from Westwood High School in Austin, Texas, in 2007. During his high school years, he balanced his interest in the arts with athletics, playing football and lacrosse. He was a unique blend of lacrosse, football and basketball jock and theater nerd.

As a prank in the eighth grade, Glen set 3,000 crickets loose in his school. "By the time the cricket thing was executed, I'm in this room with the principal," he recalled."All of the sudden, the hallways, you started seeing people run past. People are just running past like, 'Oh my God!' They're like, 'Crick-ets, crickets!' There's a dude going nuts. You can see crickets flying around. [The principal] looks at me, and he's like, 'Did you have anything to do with this?' I was like, 'I've been here the whole time, man.'"

College and Early Career Choices

After graduating high school, Powell 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.

At age 13, he landed a small role in Spy Kids 3: Game Over, then had his mom drive him to Shreveport, La., to audition for a part in Denzel Washington's 2007 film The Great Debaters. He impressed Washington, who introduced him to legendary Hollywood agent Ed Limato. On their advice, he dropped out of college and moved to L.A.

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.

Early Roles and Influences

Powell’s location in Austin helped him land his first onscreen role as a “Long-fingered Boy” in the 2003 children’s adventure sequel Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, which was filmed and produced in the city. Director Robert Rodriguez discovered Powell, then 14, while looking for “local hires” to accompany the primarily Los Angeles-based cast. “You’re just trying to find someone locally that won’t get nervous, that’ll give a performance that kind of measures up to the other actors. He walks in with a stature and confidence and just nails it,” Rodriguez told IndieWire. “So now, it’s no surprise to see [he made it as an actor], but he already had that quality at 14 and clarity of vision that that’s what he was supposed to be.”

The young actor-then credited as Glen Powell Jr.-regularly earned minor roles in lesser-known movies such as The Wendell Baker Story (2005), Fast Food Nation (2006), and The Hottest State (2006) over the next few years. Still in high school at Westwood, Powell even considered deprioritizing his acting career until receiving a pep talk from Denzel Washington on the set of the 2007 historical drama The Great Debaters. In the movie, Powell played Harvard University student Preston Whittington and impressed the two-time Oscar winner. “Denzel Washington really pushed me out of the nest a bit and said, ‘You should double-down on yourself. You should give [acting] a shot,’” Powell said on Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist.

Overcoming Challenges in Los Angeles

After moving to Los Angeles, Powell faced the typical challenges of a young actor trying to break into the industry. He lived with a wealthy family in Bel Air in exchange for teaching their son football, basketball and lacrosse, noting: "I was kind of like a manny." Glen and Glee star Chord Overstreet were roommates for years. He auditioned for roles in projects like Friday Night Lights, Cowboys & Aliens, and The Longest Ride, but faced rejection. Despite these setbacks, he gained experience through small roles in various television series, including Into the West, Jack & Bobby, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Without a Trace, Rizzoli & Isles, and The Lying Game.

Transition to Larger Roles

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. 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…"

Breakthrough Performances

Powell's career began to gain significant momentum with his roles in Hidden Figures (2016) and Set It Up (2018). In Hidden Figures, he portrayed astronaut John Glenn, showcasing his ability to handle dramatic roles. 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".

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Top Gun: Maverick and Subsequent Success

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. 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.

Glen's Top Gun: Maverick costar Tom Cruise paid for him to become a real pilot. "For Christmas, Tom bought me an iPad with my flight school downloaded and prepaid!" Later, he reported: "After months of flying, studying and testing … I'm the real deal."

In 2023, he co-starred opposite Sydney Sweeney in the romantic comedy Anyone but You, which emerged as a sleeper hit, grossing $220 million worldwide. Around its release in December 2023, the film generated buzz because of speculation about a potential off-screen romance between Powell and Sweeney, although the two stars later admitted that the appearance of a real-life relationship was part of a marketing strategy. Powell remarked to The New York Times: "That's people wanting what's on the screen off the screen and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit". He later indicated that the press tour was designed as "its own sense of entertainment". The film's success propelled Powell's career to stardom with Scott Mendelson writing: "It’s a lower-budgeted, adult-skewing rom-com that relishes - rather than represses their star charisma and sex appeal … It’s a star vehicle harkening back to when thespians, not IP or marquee characters, were franchises."

Recent and Future Projects

In the immediate aftermath, Powell was offered and signed on for a slew of star-vehicles including Chad Powers, The Running Man, How To Make A Killing, and The Great Beyond; while also turning down projects like Jurassic World: Rebirth with Powell reasoning: "I’m not doing that movie because I read the script and I immediately was like, my presence in this movie doesn’t help it …

In 2024, Powell produced and co-wrote the script of the romantic black comedy Hit Man with director Richard Linklater. Several critics praised Powell's performance in it as an undercover police contractor posing as a hitman. In 2025, Powell starred as Russ Holiday in the comedy series Chad Powers, which he helped to create and produce. The show follows Holiday's attempt to stage a comeback in football by disguising himself with a fake identity. Stuart Heritage of The Guardian called Powell's role one of the "most magnetic and magical performances in memory", while Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter didn't care for the show but thought positively of Powell: "A major piece of this hypothetical renegade ethos is seeing how far Glen Powell’s abundant natural charm can be pushed in having him play two characters who are completely unlikable in different ways? Both Russ and Chad are inconsistently written, but Powell is fully committed to all of their inconsistencies. In 2026, Powell starred in the black comedy thriller How to Make a Killing. On Powell's performance, Owen Gleiberman of Variety, wrote: "He carries the audience with his energized sense of play. He’s sleek enough to cruise through a movie like…well, Tom Cruise, and part of it is that he shares Cruise’s projection of quick-fire intelligence. He will next star in J. J.

In 2027, he will co-star opposite Cristin Milioti in an untitled Judd Apatow romantic-comedy film about a country-western star in free-fall. Glen Powell stars in the new remake of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 blockbuster The Running Man, about a man who must survive 30 days of being hunted by professional assassins on a futuristic TV show.

While filming Anyone But You in Sydney, Australia, Glen and others were in a helicopter over Sydney Harbor when the aircraft had a serious mechanical problem. "We had to emergency land in a field nearby," Glen explained to Rolling Stone. "If we crashed, we would've been history. There would've been nothing left of us."

Personal Life and Interests

Powell is a licensed pilot. Years later, after Glen hit it big, he moved back to Austin on the advice of fellow Texas Matthew McConaughey. Glen said the benefit of "getting to this point in Hollywood is that I can now leave Hollywood," he said. "It's like I've earned the ability to go back to my family."

Powell is currently single and has never married. Most recently, the actor dated model Gigi Paris for about three years, starting in 2020. They made multiple public appearances together, including at the 2022 premiere of Top Gun: Maverick. However, People reported in April 2023 the couple had “broken up several times” and decided to end their relationship for good.

Following their onscreen sparks in Anyone But You, fans began speculating that Powell and co-star Sydney Sweeney had begun a real-life relationship, coinciding with his split form Paris. Although the actors have said this isn’t true, they admitted to playing along with the gossip to help market the movie. Powell even made a cameo during Sweeney’s monologue as host of Saturday Night Live in March 2024 to poke fun at the rumors.

“Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry. That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit-and it worked wonderfully,” Powell told The New York Times.

Powell was also romantically linked to actor Nina Dobrev in 2017 and Australian TV host Renee Bargh from 2018 through 2019.

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