Glen Powell Conquered Hollywood. Was That What He Actually Wanted?

23 min readGlen Powell, the breakout movie star of the 2020s, is griping to his delightfully sleazy manager. Glen Powell’s character is griping, rather. A country crooner whose career has gone sideways. He’s pissed about having wasted a bunch of time writing a bunch of terrible songs with even worse collaborators. Too many whiskey dicks, pills, and prostitutes. In the lyrics or among the collaborators? I can’t say—I’ve been sworn to secrecy. What I can tell you is that his manager, played by comedian Stavros Halkias, gives just as good right back.We’re in Savannah, in early June. Powell is filming the country-music comedy The Comeback King, which comes out in February, with bromance auteur Judd Apatow. He’s laying his frustration on thick, but the mood in the room is light. “Hey, Jacob,” he calls out to a camera tech at one point. “Can you run that back?” He wants to check a previous take for continuity. Put your prostitutes before your pills and it all falls apart.In a way, it seems pointless to be so precious. You know how Aaron Sorkin famously doesn’t allow any improvising with his carefully crafted dialogue? Apatow is the complete, diametric opposite. Unrestrained creativity is the process. The goal: Make each other laugh.Powell and Apatow wrote the hard-R comedy together, but script is a very loose concept. Each scene must move in a certain direction, but how?—that’s figured out in real time. Apatow rarely cuts, instead calling out different punchlines—about oral sex, sorority girls, Jews, Kanye West, whatever—to try out, rapid-fire. When Apatow chuckles or, even better, mutters a coveted “That’s funny,” they move on.On set is one of Powell’s favorite places to be, but getting used to Apatow’s off-the-cuff style required a concerted adjustment. “For a guy like me, who likes to be prepared, it’s a nightmare,” Powell tells me, amused by his own limitations, sitting in his trailer between setups. Powell preps exhaustively; his lines are always memorized, his research complete. On more than one occasion he has dazzled with his ability to memorize an entire script instead of just his own part.Billy KiddCoat and sweater by Prada.This article appeared in the October 2026 issue of EsquiresubscribeEventually, he pulls himself together and gets back out there. That’s what he always does, in every project, of which there are many. He came to Savannah having already completed the second season of his college football comedy series, Chad Powers, which is streaming on Hulu. And from Savannah it’s off to Europe to finish J. J. Abrams’s hotly anticipated The Great Beyond, the box-office impresario’s first original script in fifteen years, then due to release in November. I end up spending five hours on set at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where the production is in the final weeks of filming. The very telling question I get, repeatedly, from various interns and assistants: “What project are you here for?” It turns out to be a very good question.The next morning, I get my first good look at Powell off set. He is sweating. Just shy of profusely. The thirty-seven-year-old has arrived at breakfast out of breath and glistening. “I didn’t look like this a second ago,” he says, semi-apologizing for the perspiration that is quickly spreading across his shirt. Probably true, but thirty minutes prior, Powell found himself at an alternate location of the restaurant we planned to meet at. Upon realizing his error, he had to book it, on foot and carrying his dog, across town.His lines are harsher in person. The angle of his cheekbones and jaw sharper. His face narrower and his frame trimmer. His hair is long and mussed—mullet might be a word you’d use if you saw it, though we’ll chalk that up to the country-fried role in the Apatow movie. His temples and beard, damp from sweat, are flecked with gray. It suits him.He’s ready for coffee. Not his first of the day, certainly not his last. Powell likes having a vice, and he likes even more that his vice is coffee. Every day, he drinks it until his body screams for him to stop. It’s thrilling and, ultimately, innocent. He orders a cold brew with steamed almond milk.What else does Glen Powell want? Food, for sure—harvest bowl, no cheese, add three eggs for him, unseasoned chicken and a bowl of fresh water for his diminutive Chihuahua-mix companion, Brisket. To get back to his girlfriend, Landman actress Michelle Randolph, who flew in this morning to spend his off day with him. But what about in the big, broader, grander sense? The actor has been in high-speed motion for four years—since Top Gun: Maverick blasted into theaters and catapulted him to the top of every casting director’s wish list—moving at a pace that begs even the casual viewer to wonder if he’ll ever rest. To what end? Oscars and industry awards? Fame and fortune? That’s what I’m here to find out.That’s what I think, at least, throughout our breakfast, and for at least a month after. But then something insane happens—insane for me, magazine writer, and insane for Glen Powell, actor so committed to remaining in constant motion he literally remade a movie called The Running Man. Due to a remarkable confluence of unsexy forces, including the Warner Bros. and Paramount merger, IMAX material requirements, and shifting production timelines for other studio projects, in July it’s announced that The Great Beyond would be bumped out a year into the future, now releasing in October 2027.When I can finally get on Powell’s schedule to speak again in August, calendars are still reorienting around the shift. There is, after all, an estimated $1 billion in projects attached to his name in the pipeline. They all need slots for prep, filming, and, most important, promotion.I expect it to be his doomsday scenario. Or at least the trigger of a fair amount of perspiration. But unlike unrestrained improvisation or his walk to breakfast, having the biggest project of his career brought to a screeching halt doesn’t raise Powell’s internal temperature.What he tells me is: “I really am built for this.”Billy KiddCoat and trousers by Emporio Armani; shirt by Paul Smith.Industry handwringers have spilled an ocean liner’s worth of ink in the past decade debating who will be Hollywood’s next leading man. Will Austin Butler be Method enough? Can Jacob Elordi pretend to enjoy the attention? Is Timothée Chalamet a big-enough Knicks fan? Who will become the guy? The one women want to date and dudes want to drink with. Meanwhile, Glen Powell arrived via good old-fashioned elbow grease and unbridled enthusiasm.Maverick was quite the introduction. A billion and a half dollars at the box office at a time when the Covid pandemic had people seriously considering if anyone would ever go to movie theaters again. But his follow-up run sealed the deal. Anyone but You, his 2023 rom-com—a format that’s been largely ignored by the silver screen for the past twenty years—grossed more than $220 million globally. He topped that just one year later with the disaster-flick sequel Twisters, which surpassed $372 million. He was already dominating screens at home when that tore through town: The deceptively smart, deliciously fun Hit Man, which he cowrote with director Richard Linklater, was on its way to racking up billions of minutes of streaming on Netflix.In some ways, his ascent feels inevitable. He’s likable and good-looking, embodying a sort of masculinity—blond, buff, confident—that has been popular in pretty much every era of Hollywood except, so far, this one. But the arc that got him there is peculiar as hell.Powell made his way to Los Angeles fifteen years prior at the urging of legendary talent agent Ed Limato, dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin—his dream school—after just one year. Limato broke a Murderers’ Row of superstars during his career (Denzel Washington, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steve Martin, Mel Gibson, and Nic Cage), and after seeing Powell in The Great Debaters, which starred Washington, Limato told Powell he thought he had what it takes.Powell wasn’t really trying to be a professional actor at the time. Born in Austin, he grew up in a modest house on a modest street with his parents, Cyndy and Glen Powell Sr., and two sisters. Powell is the middle child and only son. Lauren is two years his senior; Leslie, four years his junior. He was friendly and funny and into everything. He made appearances in various productions—professional ones that filmed in Texas, like Spy Kids 3, and amateur ones that were performed live at his middle school and high school. But it was always just one thing he was doing, never the main thing. “We have a mantra in our family,” his father, Glen Sr., tells me: “Advance on all fronts.”Powell also played lacrosse, football, and the violin and spent any free time he could find pulling pranks. (“He gets that from his mother,” adds Dad.) He was the runt of the grade but made up for it in effort. “I always had grit,” Powell recalls. His wit served him equally well; after a dismal turn on the unscripted physical-challenge TV show Endurance—he was eliminated immediately—he learned the power of being able to find a way to laugh at anything. Most of all yourself. “It was embarrassing,” he says. “Especially going back to school and being in a locker room full of guys. You realize that if you’re the first to make a joke about yourself, that neutralizes it for everyone else. But it also neutralizes it for yourself too.”Humor became his shield. When Powell inherited his mom’s old blue van—a 1990 Toyota Previa—he got ahead of the jokes again. “I put plastic spinners and neons on it,” he recalls. “I put nitrous-oxide stickers in the windows, and I reconfigured the seats to make it a party van.”He never, he swears, practiced an Oscars acceptance speech in the privacy of his bedroom, tucked under the covers. “Genuinely,” he adds, for extra assurance. But he really loved movies, and he really liked being on set. So with his parents’ blessing and Limato’s promises to help him upon arrival, he packed his bags and abandoned his fledgling radio, television, and film major. “We were excited,” recalls Glen Sr. “We tried to keep it in perspective about how hard it might be, but the reality was a lot harder.”The superagent’s name got Powell auditions early on, but little came from them, and Limato died not long after. Things got very quiet for the young Texan then. “He really had to get creative,” Glen Sr. says of how his son would locate castings. He lost out on plenty of parts that would go on to be well-known. Captain America, young Han Solo, Tim Riggins—Powell, former high school football player from Texas, took that last one especially personally. It wasn’t just the good shit Powell couldn’t get. He also got rejected from a bunch of go-nowhere roles in go-nowhere productions. But Powell has what Max Weber would call a Protestant work ethic. He would not be deterred.Billy KiddCoat, shirt, trousers, and loafers by Hermès.Commitment is a curious thing, and whether someone is succeeding tends to determine how everyone around them perceives it. Grind it out for years and eventually become the rarest of things—a movie star—and your sweat will be revered. Throw yourself into your attempts full bore, years on end, just to return home for a weekend with college friends with, literally, no credits to show and, well, be prepared to get dismissed. Looked down on. Pitied. This is where Powell lived for a very long time. He remembers one such trip vividly. His former classmates were all getting ready to graduate and start their real jobs. They had plans. Powell had nothing. “I was like, I booked a Verizon commercial—but I ended up getting cut in the edit,” he recalls. Their faces said it all: When is he going to realize that we’re going to be graduated, with real jobs, and he’s going to still be trying to get his start?Powell did not enjoy that in the slightest. “It lit me on fire,” he recalls. “I was like, They’re going to get every bit of me until I freaking do it.” Johnny the Teacher, Trader #1, Good-Looking Frat Guy—they weren’t great roles, but he did eventually get them.He begged his way into the supporting cast of Sylvester Stallone’s action melee The Expendables 3 in 2014 and took a role so small it wouldn’t cover his rent in Hidden Figures two years later. A turning point arrived with Netflix’s surprise mini hit Set It Up in 2018, but if that got him more auditions, it didn’t get him more leading parts. Then he read for Top Gun: Maverick, and the rejection he received would end up forcing the most important decision of his professional career.Powell wanted the role of Rooster—the lead—and, despite how most of his auditions had gone for the past decade, he was so confident in his performance that he had a friend film him when director Joe Kosinski called afterward. Except Kosinski and Cruise wanted Miles Teller for the part. They offered Powell the part of Hangman, the abrasive, arrogant antagonist.Powell said no.The thing is, Tom Cruise doesn’t really like hearing that word, and after a frank conversation with Powell in a studio conference room several months later, Cruise promised he’d elevate the character to something worth doing. The ask was simple: Trust me. Powell agreed. Filming took a year, and then the edit took another. By the time the film was ready, Covid was raging and theaters were closed. The studio told Cruise to release it for at-home viewing, and now it was Cruise’s turn to decline. He wanted to wait.Billy KiddSweater and trousers by Tom Ford; Speedmaster watch by Omega.That delay tested every individual strand of Powell’s patience. “You’re just waiting for your life to change,” he explains. It did. Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of Maverick but also so many other movies you love, like Armageddon, Bad Boys, and Pirates of the Caribbean, says he had fun ribbing Powell after the film’s release: “I said to him, ‘How would you feel right now if you had turned down the part?’ ”Fifteen years of toiling and suddenly Powell had his choice of roles and directors. So far, his choice has been yes. Since Maverick debuted, Powell has added six live-action films (one of which he cowrote) and two seasons of a TV series (that he wrote and produced) to his résumé. He has lent his voice to two animated projects and launched a production company, Barnstorm, and a line of organic condiments, Smash Kitchen. He has hosted Saturday Night Live, was the celebrity picker when CollegeGameDay came to DKR–Texas Memorial Stadium, and stunned “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans with his ability to perspire. He’s played a cocky storm chaser and a desperate blue-collar laborer and a college professor with an alter ego and various men working in finance.It’s a slate that would fill the fantasies of any young hopeful. But it extracts a cost in time and effort.Powell knows that to really succeed you have to be in good movies, says Bruckheimer. “He’s really handsome and a terrific actor and he’s got all the right values, but the most important thing is the work. It’s what you put onscreen and the energy and effort you put into it. Glen will do that.”“Did you know I got hurt on The Running Man?” Powell asks me, when the three of us—Powell, me, and Brisket—are still sitting at breakfast. It’s almost an aside, the way it comes up. I am asking Powell if he struggles to stay present. Can he focus on the day’s work, or is his mind always worried about the next script or shoot or deliverable? It’s something he’s struggled with, deeply. A rough stretch that started at the end of 2025—a gruesome injury on the set of the dystopian action outing, followed by uneven box-office results—finally revealed how desperately something needed to change.The Running Man shoot was long and cold and physically taxing. For the most part, Powell loved it. Loved working with director Edgar Wright, loved doing such punishing stunts. Except then one went wrong. In what would be the film’s final combat scene, the Evan McCone character stabs the hand of Powell’s character. On set, they used a prop knife with a retractable blade, but the blunt force still wreaked havoc. Powell ruptured a tendon in his hand, except he didn’t know he ruptured a tendon and was instead hyperfocused on not delaying production. “Running Man had a release date, and I had the J. J. Abrams movie on deck,” he says by way of explanation.THREE HITS IN A ROW AND POWELL HEADED FOR HOME. NO LESS A TEXAN THAN MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY SAID HE COULD. SAID HE SHOULD.But the pain worsened and his hand began to swell and swell. Soon Powell found himself in a Bulgarian emergency room, where he learned not only that the tissue had been severed completely but also that he had a septic infection. “This is the real deal,” the doctors cautioned. Powell needed surgery right away, and before he was put under, the attendings gave him a warning: “You could wake up without a hand.”Powell’s medical team recommended he keep the injury dry, warm, and at rest. Instead, he and the filmmakers wrote the need for bandages into the script, and Powell shot the very next day, scaling an apartment building in, as he recalls, “negative 10 degree weather with one arm.” He had nothing but a bath towel slung around his waist.“I left that movie broken, physically and emotionally,” Powell admits. He started to ask himself tough questions. Like, for instance, “Do you keep sprinting?”Expectations for The Running Man were sky-high, but ticket sales were weak. More hard lessons. “They let go of an entire marketing department a month before our movie came out in the middle of a merger,” says Powell, referencing behind-the-scenes chaos at Paramount, the film’s studio. And then his immediate follow-up, the 2026 A24 thriller How to Make a Killing, came and went with minimal fanfare. “There were a lot of issues with that,” Powell says. “There just was not enough time to do it properly. I look back on that one as an example of going, You know what, there’s no rush.” Except Powell’s slate was full, and there was a rush. It doesn’t sit right.The toll was obvious to those around him. Powell, naturally boisterous and always on the hunt for fun, had grown quiet. “I was not living in the here and now,” he says. He couldn’t focus on his friends or family, even when he was with them.“You’re losing a little bit of that magic,” his mom and sisters told him. Their advice was simple. Set some boundaries. Protect your time. Powell listened. “I take what they say as the word of God,” he says.Still, disappointing people is not something that comes easily to him. He likes to host. Loves to please. “I would give someone my bed to the detriment of myself,” he admits. It’s always been this way. He never even got in trouble growing up, he tells me, which I accept as fact after his mother confirms it. But he wants to do this job for a long time—maybe even forever—so he’s made some changes. Hired an assistant and got selfish with both his time and his contact information. He even began plotting a break.Billy KiddCoat and trousers by Stòffa; shoes by Repetto; hat by Emporio Armani; Speedmaster watch by Omega.When I first meet Powell, he’s entering his trailer decked out in full country-western garb. Pearl-snap shirt, big belt buckle, boots. He’s between scenes, and before sitting down to talk while simultaneously inhaling a plate of steak from catering (“Can you get another one of these for me to have later?” he’ll ask his assistant after just a few bites), he steals a moment to FaceTime his girlfriend. “Say hi to Esquire,” he says as the door clicks closed behind him.Powell’s happy to be in a relationship, and he wants to be a good partner. There were times during the past few years when he wondered if that was possible. As a testament to how deep that anxiety had burrowed, during our time together he will say a version of “I think I’m a good boyfriend” a handful of times.When Maverick debuted, Powell had been in a several-year-long relationship with the model Gigi Paris. It ended sometime just before Anyone but You hit. That was hard, and it only got harder when Powell and costar Sydney Sweeney manufactured intrigue about their own relationship to draw interest to the film. Powell’s head was swirling from the blast of attention and unnatural mix of real emotions and fake storylines. He wouldn’t do it again, he says now of the guerrilla marketing. “I’ve moved on to a new chapter of my life.”At some point in the hyper-speed years that followed, Powell began to worry he’d never be able to settle down, something he very much wants to do. “I was starting to get nihilistic,” he admits. “It was hard.”During a particularly fraught moment, Powell enlisted the help of his father, an executive life coach. It helped. “When you’re in a relationship with somebody, that’s a whole different thing from a relationship with somebody on set,” Glen Sr. explains to me. Now, he says, his son has “been able to learn how to separate the roles that he’s playing.”How’d he actually do it, though? Like a lot of things in life, the solution arrived in its own way, on its own time. Or, as Powell says, “It’s the person.” He elaborates: “You can really diagnose yourself with an inability to show up for somebody when, in reality, you just need to find a person who it’s both of you making room for each other.”Powell and Randolph first caught the attention of gossip hounds in the fall of 2025; it’s a recipe that Powell says just works. “Life is fast for both of us,” he says, “and we have the same values. She loves her family. I love my family. And we both care about work a lot. We both like to show up for our partners. And yet we also understand the balance of it all.”Hollywood is not exactly known for launching healthy, long-lasting relationships. The schedules, the inherent competition, the way social media lets the public sneak between two people with unsolicited opinions. It’s all a mindfuck. For Powell, his relationship with Randolph is the antidote. “There’s something so lovely,” he says, “about someone rooting for you. Someone who wants you to win in all the ways that are good for you as a human. Not just professionally but in all the ways that are good for your soul.” Ways like giving you an excuse to slow down and spend the better part of a summer in Paris.Randolph was due to spend much of July and August in the City of Light filming, and Powell tagged along. He joins our late-summer Zoom from the Mandarin Oriental, which, coincidentally, has been transformed into a set for the fourth season of HBO’s The White Lotus. A producer friend offered up the room. Yes, it’s a set, but for Powell it’s still an escape. Mainly from himself.It’s been fun, he admits. Healthy too. It’s given him time to get organized. Allowed him to, as he says, “remind myself what I love about this job.” He’s been ticking through some big topics, like “Is my family financially secure? Are they healthy? Are we including them in the ride? And how can I be the best producer at Barnstorm?”He’s been pleased with the answers he’s finding. Still, a leopard doesn’t change its spots: “It’s like, how can we do this better?”Billy KiddShirt and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.When Glen Sr. and Cyndy got married in 1984, the couple took her last name. The Powells that Cyndy hailed from were a known Texas family, involved in politics. She was serving in the Reagan administration at the U. S. Treasury Department, and while she was deciding if she was going to make a lifelong career out of it, they felt that keeping “Powell” was smart. Plus, Glen Sr.’s own surname sort of sucked, phonetically. Chutsky. It was easy for Dad, says Glen, to make the change. “My dad is the most evolved—” he says, not finishing the sentence before interrupting himself with another idea.Despite his mother’s work, Powell says the dinner-table conversation in his home almost never turned to current events while he and his sisters were growing up. “Thank God,” he adds.Politics interests him even less now. “Over time,” he says, “I realized that politics divide people. People trying to prove their point—for me, it’s the worst version of a conversation. I genuinely do not like the discourse. It’s not as healthy as it once was.”Engaging, then, for him is “not presently possible,” he says. “I applaud people for jumping into those things and fighting for what they believe in. If I were a political person, I would be talking about it. For me, my calling is elsewhere.”It’s a position of enormous privilege to be able to say that, but look—Glen Powell really and seriously loves movies. His love for movies is so big that there are times during our conversation when I wonder if he really cares for acting or if it’s just a means to an end—a way to get on set and get a film made. Powell chews on that thought for a moment. “That’s probably a good perception,” he allows.When he was struggling in L. A., he never considered going home. But he did consider other jobs in the field. Stunts, directing, writing. “There was a moment where I was sitting there where I was thinking, Maybe I could be an exec,” he adds.That’s definitely his reputation. “It is a privilege to work with Glen, a rare multi-hyphenate who knows how to entertain global audiences in front of and behind the camera,” says Peter Cramer, the president of Universal Pictures, the studio behind Twisters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and The Comeback King and where Powell now has a coveted partnership. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with him.”Powell wants to make projects that cause people to gather. As he says, “I want to bring people together over a common thing.” Mass appeal. Butts in seats. Something you’ll watch every year.One of those projects is, certainly, The Great Beyond. And it’s really a shame that the project got moved, because Powell is dying to talk about it. Abrams has always been a mythic figure for the actor. He was a writer on Armageddon, a formative film and frequent reference point for Powell, after all. The real-life experience was better than he could have dreamed. Abrams invited Powell into every part of the process. He would call with updates throughout writing; once, the notoriously secretive director FaceTimed Powell from a shopping aisle to talk through a crucial plot point. As Powell recalls, “I was like, ‘J. J., you’re in a Target. You want to just call me in five minutes?’ ”Things only improved on set. “He’s one of the very few directors I’ve ever worked with where we would go out for dinner after work and have a drink and a meal and talk about the day,” says Powell. “We were just best buds. It was the exact thing I needed at that moment in my life.”There is also the untitled Ron Howard movie about firefighters that is—well, let me just ask him. Is that Backdraft 2? “It’s not,” he says. “It has no connection to that movie. It just happens to have fire involved.” He’s excited about this one because he wants to shoot fire like Maverick shot fighter pilots: for real. Plus, he adds, “Who hates a firefighter?”He’s also teaming up with Richard Linklater again. Before Hit Man, they first hit it off on set for Linklater’s cultishly adored baseball movie Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016. Next they’ll tell the story of Yankees icon Lou Gehrig. The idea came from a conversation Powell had with Lorne Michaels at the Saturday Night Live after-party following Powell’s hosting turn. (Michaels is a producer on the upcoming film.) “It’s really not a baseball movie,” Powell says. “It’s about how the lottery of life is not necessarily fair or expected.”Powell says there is nothing to share about plans for Top Gun 3. “I probably know as much as you do,” he says. This is, of course, bullshit. Powell speaks to Tom Cruise regularly; Cruise has become a mentor and a safe space for him in this industry. Cruise tends, Powell says, to have a sixth sense and gives him a call when he knows he needs it most. They spoke last week by phone and recently had dinner in London. So, like I said, bullshit.Powell laughs. “I know general brushstrokes of a story,” he admits. “I haven’t read anything.” He’s spoken to both “TC and Jerry”—as in Bruckheimer—but, he cautions, “Tom’s not going to do it unless he thinks it can beat Maverick.” A tall order indeed. “Hopefully I’m not the age of Maverick in Maverick by the time I make it.”They can’t all possibly be hits. But they’ve all got a chance, and the process is the point for Powell anyway. Each of these filmmakers is inspiring him to be better and bolder and funnier than ever before. “I believe in what I’m making,” he says. “And I do work really, really hard to try to make sure that it’s something that audiences want.”Later, he adds: “It’s not an easy thing to care so much.”Billy KiddCoat by Zegna; shirt by Tod’s; jeans by Brut Archive; boots, Powell’s own.How much Glen Powell loves being with his family is almost as well-known as Glen Powell himself. His parents are frequent red-carpet guests and have also appeared in many of his projects. They are all over his social media and work their way into most of his answers in interviews. “He’s a fabulous son,” Bruckheimer says more than once during our short phone call to discuss Powell’s career.When Powell was twenty-four, both of his parents were diagnosed with cancer. Any cancer is bad, but his mom’s was really bad. Powell grows emotional speaking about the event some thirteen years later. “I remember exactly where I was getting that news,” he says. “And how I felt, and how she felt at that time.” The memory pulls him away for a moment. His eyes cloud over and he stares off into the distance. He swallows the feelings that bottle up in his throat, not without difficulty.The Powells didn’t have a ton of money. And while Powell is grateful for the lessons that imparted, mainly that you can’t have everything and your choices between what is available will define you, it also meant that they couldn’t afford the best care. Powell, a dead-broke wannabe actor, couldn’t do much. Still, “I was like a telemarketer,” Powell recalls, “calling everyone I knew who could have donated to a hospital ever.” He felt useless. “I was poor, and I had nothing going on. I had no resources to help my mom. And I know people who, because they couldn’t get good care, their parents died.”Powell’s parents returned to good health. But Powell knew he never wanted to be in that position ever again. That he would never be in that position again. “In terms of financial motivation, that was it,” he says. So he worked. And worked. To keep everyone close together. To keep everyone healthy.A few years ago, his parents weren’t doing great again health-wise, for different reasons. Powell spared no expense. Concierge doctors. Treatment plans. Whatever they needed. They returned to even keel. “I can’t tell you the feeling I had afterward,” Powell says. Relief, euphoria, accomplishment.He felt then that he had been able to do the thing he’d always wanted to do. And in some ways, he had. But something was still missing.It has been said that the further west you go in America, the bigger the sky grows. Not for Powell. Far from mom and dad as well as his niece and nephew in Los Angeles, his sky felt smaller, more limiting. He stayed only so long as he felt he had to. Three hits in a row and Powell headed for home. No less a Texan than Matthew McConaughey said he could. Said he should. Something about living real life and protecting your humanity.Powell bought himself a big house at the end of a pretty great street. Then he bought the one next door and moved his parents in. After that, he bought another one and moved his older sister and her husband and their kids in. And after all that, he bought still one more. He’s currently renovating it, so its future occupants—his younger sister, her husband, and their newborn baby—live with him.And that’s where he’ll be sitting pretty while he waits out The Great Beyond. (Figuratively. He’ll certainly be working.)Powell isn’t one for dogmatic religion. Raised in the South, he says he caught on early to the way people would hide bad behaviors behind the cloak of holiness, and it turned him off from the whole thing. But he does believe in God, and he is spiritual. He prays often, mainly in gratitude. That the elbow grease paid off. Hollywood has its leading man, and it’s him. He’s got industry capital and literal capital, and he’s able to spend both on things that are important to him. But he’s discovered it’s something else that “feels religious.”“When I have those moments with my family, like we’re all sitting together, about to have a meal, and laughing so hard—” he says, setting the scene, before cutting himself off to marvel at the occurrence. “How great that I can laugh until I cry with my family.”He’s grateful that the thing he left Texas for all those years ago worked out, sure. But those moments back home, around the dinner table—well, what more could Glen Powell possibly want?As seen in the opening image: Coat by Louis Vuitton Men’s.Story by Madison VainPhotographed by Billy KiddStyling by Chloe HartsteinGrooming by Jennifer Brent at Forward Artists using Bondi BoostSet Design by Michael Sturgeon Tailoring by Yana GalbshteinEsquire Executive Design Director: Martin HoopsEsquire Visual Director: James Morris Director of Video: Amanda Kabbabe Director/Supervising Producer: Brian Murray-RealProducer: Ali Buchalter Supervising Cinematographer: Derrick Woodyard DP: Alvah Holmes Editor: Josh Archer Fashion BTS Filmed & Edited by: Sam Miller Esquire Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler Esquire Editor-in-chief: Michael Sebastian