Glen Powell wants more from Hollywood for American audiences.
“Having grown up in and around Texas, I know there are many parts of America that are underserved with the movies they want to see,” he said. Telegraph this week.
“New York and Los Angeles make the decisions about what gets produced, but there’s a whole other audience that has to be considered.”
Powell was born and raised in Texas and recently returned to Austin after spending 15 years in Los Angeles to be near family and earn a degree from the University of Texas.
Glen Powell’s parents crashed a movie screening in Texas to taunt him
Glen Powell told The Telegraph he felt there were “a lot of parts of America that are not being offered the films they want to see.” (Dave Bennett/WireImage)
He told The Hollywood Reporter in May that Matthew McConaughey inspired the move, saying, “He said, ‘Hollywood is the Matrix. You plug in and everything is fake.'”
Powell continued, “He said, ‘Then I’m going to Austin and I’m going to turn it off. It’s all real. These are my friends and my family and what I do there matters,’ and he’s right.”
“When you’re here, you’re always living in the Matrix. There’s no separation between those worlds,” he said of Hollywood.
The 35-year-old has slowly but surely taken the movie world by storm over the past few years, starring in films such as Top Gun: Maverick alongside Tom Cruise, as well as last year’s The Hitman and Anyone But You.
Glen Powell, on the left, co-starred with Tom Cruise in the blockbuster film Top Gun: Maverick, which was released in 2022. (Han Myung-Ku/Getty Images, courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
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“Anyone But You” was hailed as a revival of the romantic comedy genre, which was considered “dead” by many in Hollywood.
“One thing I’ve noticed recently is that when studios say a genre is dead, it only means there’s a huge opportunity because the market is not being met,” Powell told the outlet.
“The film industry seems to have stopped making romantic comedies because they don’t make money in theaters. But it’s my belief that there is no problem facing Hollywood that a really good movie can’t solve.”
The film ultimately grossed $220 million worldwide.
Glen Powell co-starred with Sydney Sweeney in the 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. (Mark von Holden/NBC via Getty Images)
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Powell will next star in “Twisters,” the sequel to the 1996 hit “Twister,” which starred Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Powell said Twisters was not a film with a climate message.
“First of all, if you tell people what to think, you’re not engaging them in an emotional way. If people are thinking, ‘Hmm, I either agree with this message or I don’t,’ you’re not going to get them on that high,” he said.
Glen Powell said “Twisters” has nothing to do with climate change. (Monica Schipper/FilmMagic)
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“Obviously, we may want to discuss other things later,” Powell added, “but that’s not what our film is about. This is about man and woman facing nature, and finding out who we really are in the face of the storm.”
“Twisters” hits theaters on Friday, July 19th.
Fox News Digital’s Ashley Hume contributed to this report.
