High Flier

Glen Powell’s career has gone high-velocity this year with a breakout role in Set It Up. Now he’s getting his need for speed in Top Gun: Maverick and co-starring with Channing Tatum in an action-comedy. Watch his career go sky-high…

- Jamie Graham

The first time Total Film met Glen Powell, aka The Hottest Actor In Hollywood Right Now, was at Austin’s South By Southwest festival in March 2016. College dramedy Everybody Wants Some!! had opened to rave reviews the night before, and writer-director Richard Linklater was sprawled out in a sun-soaked suite at the Four Seasons Hotel with all of his hunky cast, watching them slurp down coffee and fork scrambled eggs to ward off hangovers.

Powell, who stole the movie as Finnegan, the smooth-talking older student who coins the term “fuckwithery” and picks up dates by boasting of his average-sized penis, wandered over and started chatting, thanking Total Film for the feature on the movie that broke a couple of days before. Unpardonably handsome, Powell was also impossibly charming, inviting Total Film to party with the Everybody Wants Some!! cast in London when they flew in for the film’s UK release.

Fast-forward two-and-a-half years and the prediction made in the aforementioned TF feature – that Everybody Wants Some!!, the “spiritual sequel” of Linklater’s Dazed And Confused, would do for its young cast what that movie did for then-unknowns Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck and Milla Jovovich – is coming true for Powell. Last year he impressed as astronaut John Glenn in Oscar-nominated drama Hidden Figures, and this year he bewitched as Lily James’ fiancé in romantic-drama The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society – so much so, you wanted James to stay with him and not fall for dashing potato farmer Michiel Huisman.