Why the Glen Powell Lovefest Makes Me Uncomfortable

I have a strange habit of turning on things I love as soon as they become popular. If everyone likes something, I assume it must be bad. So I’m trying to be honest with myself about what’s happening with Glen Powell right now, both within me and without. I first got turned onto Powell in Richard Linklater’s 2016 college baseball film Everybody Wants Some!!. He played Finn,  a senior who seems to have realized he doesn’t have a future in pro ball, and so has begun developing interests outside of baseball. He engages his intellect, and lectures his teammates about probability and determinism. He wants to date a “theater chick,” a woman he has little in common with, while most of his teammates are content to pick up groupies at the local disco. Adorned with a mustache and shaggy hair that hid his chiseled jaw, Powell both blended into the fabric of the film and stood out as clearly the most talented actor on the roster.

Now he’s one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He turned heads with his supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick, jumped to the top of the call sheet with this winter’s surprise hit Anyone But You, and is the headliner of Twisters, which just shocked insiders with its $80 million opening weekend. It’s debatable whether people showed up for Powell or for the tornados, but the guy has been in two hit movies this year, so he surely deserves a little credit. Right now, he’s the It Guy.

I’m not totally thrilled about it. I have two strains of worry about Powell. The first is that he will take the wrong lessons from this success and bypass what makes him interesting. In Top Gun and Twisters, he’s like a movie star created in a lab. Charming in only the most superficial ways, which is to say: handsome and jacked with a great smile. It’s true that he has little to work with in the way of characterization—blame the scripts for that—but a great star can bring some personality to even the thinnest of roles. Tom Cruise, to whom Powell is most often compared, was incredible at this. I love the way Cruise’s voice breaks when he yells, revealing the unformed teenager inside his grown-up body. Powell doesn’t have anything like that. He’s got a thick shell that reveals little.

When Powell is gifted a character that embodies some interesting ideas, as in Everybody Wants Some!!, he nails it. He really showed his range in this year’s Hit Man, in which he plays an introvert who finds his calling playing a fake hitman-for-hire in police stings. Powell does sharp costume and accent work, transforming in a way he never has before on film. He also did a cool thing that many young stars do: he played a nerdy, insecure character who takes on a new persona and becomes cool over the course of the narrative. Powell ends up adopting the guise of a slick, sexy hitman full time. The effect on the viewer is to watch a recognizable actor become an A-list star.

It gives his performance a depth that his more basic movie star roles don’t have. There have been countless articles written in the last year about how Powell is “the next great star.” People have been waiting for years for another classic movie star to show up—perhaps on the assumption that an exciting star can reinvigorate interest in cinema itself—but how exactly do we define that? What is it about Powell that screams “movie star?” What quality exactly does he have and others lack?

I can’t help but feel it has something to do with his race, or perceived lack thereof. When we say Powell is a throwback to the kind of movie star we don’t have anymore, we are really saying that he’s white, male, and handsome. There’s a lineage of movie stars that includes Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Cruise, George Clooney, and Brad Pitt. The kind of actors that you either want to sleep with or be best friends with, depending on your sexual identity. The common denominator is their whiteness. With very few exceptions—Poitier, Denzel, Will Smith, and Halle Berry—Black actors just don’t get to graduate to this level, where a film can be marketed to widespread audiences on their participation alone. And it has been a long time since that happened.

I’m not saying that Powell’s fans are white supremacists. It’s more a question of why Powell is getting the opportunities and adulation that so few actors of color do. We should ask why Powell is the actor who’s going to save movie theaters instead of Michael B. Jordan, who has starred in numerous blockbusters but doesn’t seem to get any good opportunities outside of franchise films. And why two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali is still struggling to find film roles that make use of his prodigious talent. And how Lupita Nyong’o is somehow not a star, despite winning an Oscar at a young age and giving the performance of the decade in Jordan Peele’s Us. I’m afraid the answer is the same as it has always been; Hollywood has changed, but it hasn’t changed that much. It loves a white savior, and Powell’s coronation is just the latest example.