8 Roles You Didn’t Know Glen Powell Played

When it comes to young movie stars making a bid to be the “next Tom Cruise,” Glen Powell is in a class of his own. In fact, the Texas native went toe-to-toe with Cruise himself with a breakout performance in Top Gun: Maverick, and since then has been on an undeniable winning streak.

Between revitalizing the cinematic rom-com with Anyone But You (and hopping around Dallas with his co-star Sydney Sweeney), taking over a legendary disaster franchise with Twisters and scoring some award season nominations for Hit Man (which he also co-wrote), Powell has easily become one of the industry’s most in-demand actors.

Powell is busier than ever this year, thanks to the remake of The Running Man, Hulu’s Chad Powers and a well-received turn as the host of Saturday Night Live, but his route to stardom didn’t happen overnight. As is the case with most actors, Powell’s early years in the industry were marked by brief roles, thankless parts and a few embarrassing appearances that everyone has managed to forget. Even if you’ve seen Set it Up on Netflix a dozen times, these are the roles you need to see to really understand “our guy Glen.”

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)
3-D gimmickry hasn’t ever quite reached the same heights as it did in the third chapter of Robert Rodriguez’s youth-oriented espionage series. In the third installment, heroes Juni (Daryl Sabara) and Carmen Cortez (Alexa PenaVega) head into the world of a video game to stop the villain known as “The Toymaker,” played by Sylvester Stallone in one of the most shameless paycheck roles of his career. You wouldn’t be blamed for forgetting Powell entirely, as he was 15 at the time that he played one of Juni’s bullies, who is amusingly credited as “Long-Fingered Boy.”

Fast Food Nation (2006)
Powell has a pretty small role in the issue-based drama Fast Food Nation, but it’s worth remembering as the first film he made with the legendary Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater, with whom he would work again on Everybody Wants Some and Hit Man. In an interview with The Big Picture, Powell noted that Linklater showed a form of kindness by writing the film around an injury the former suffered right before shooting began. 

The Great Debaters (2007)
There are few better mentors that an actor could ask for other than Denzel Washington, who took a rare step behind the camera when he directed this historical drama based on the true story of an African-American debate team. Powell has only a brief role in the film as a seasoned debater who faces off with the film’s heroes in the final act, but the Texas native credits Washington with helping boost his confidence and encouraging him to “take his shot.”

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Everybody wants to be in a Batman movie, even if it means getting thrown around by a masked supervillain in the middle of a stock exchange. It’s easy to forget that the highly anticipated third chapter in Christopher Nolan’s award-winning superhero trilogy spends its first half centered on the supervillain Bane (Tom Hardy), who takes to the streets of Gotham after disrupting its economy; Nolan was apparently inspired by both Occupy Wall Street and A Tale of Two Cities. It’s not a particularly memorable performance, but Powell at least got to check working with Nolan off his bucket list. 

The Expendables 3 (2014)
The Expendables franchise was launched with the idea of showcasing aging action stars like Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren returning to their roots as a group of retired mercenaries. It’s a pretty novel concept before you realize that Stallone doesn’t exactly have an ear for sharp dialogue, and that the geriatric characters are clearly not doing all their own stunts by the time that the franchise made it to a third entry. Powell deserves some credit for adding a bit of youthful energy to The Expendables 3, which had to cut back on its violence in order to earn a PG-13 rating. Nonetheless, Powell is clearly doing his best to elevate the material, which is more than can be said for Harrison Ford (who fails to make eye contact with the camera for the entire film).

Hidden Figures (2016)
Powell had graduated to more prominent roles by the time he appeared in the Oscar-nominated biopic Hidden Figures, which tells the extraordinary true story of the three Black women responsible for making calculations for NASA during the height of the Space Race. Powell has a fairly significant role as astronaut John Glen, who became the third American to go to space, and the first to complete an orbital mission. Although Hidden Figures doesn’t depict his moonwalk, it does note that Glen was a supporter of the Civil Rights Act who went out of his way to ensure that NASA didn’t employ segregationist tactics.

Apollo 10 ½ (2022)
Powell’s friendship with Linklater led him to make a fun cameo in the Texan director’s animated adventure Apollo 10 ½, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about a kid from Houston growing up during the summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon. As was the case with Linklater’s previous animated films, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10 ½ utilized an experimental technique known as “rotoscoping,” in which an actor’s likeness is represented using watercolor-esque visuals. The effect is a bit uncanny, but Powell does seem to be having fun as a straight-laced NASA official who gives the film’s young protagonist a stern lesson about space safety.

“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Cheater,” Family Guy (2024)
You haven’t really made it until you’ve made an appearance on The Simpsons, South Park or Family Guy. Powell got his chance to be in the latter for last year’s Halloween special, in which he plays an egotistical Patrick McCloskey, a Quagmire resident who has reigned victorious in the town’s Giant Pumpkin Contest. While Family Guy hasn’t been quite the same after Seth MacFarlane exited the core writing cast nearly a decade ago, “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Cheater” is one of the show’s strongest episodes in recent years. Even for those who’ve had their fill of MacFarlane’s juvenile humor, the gag involving how McCloskey has managed to cheat at the Pumpkin event is worth giving the special a watch.