While he’s had success in Top Gun and Anyone but You—so much so that he’s reportedly now the second-most bankable actor in Hollywood after Timothée Chalamet—Hit Man is the role that finally proves his mettle. (Linklater has a knack for pulling Powell’s best work out of him—I first took note of him, mustachioed and swaggering, in Everybody Wants Some!!) In Hit Man, Powell gets to flex a bit, playing multiple undercover identities to zany perfection.
It certainly helps that he has a great lead partner in Adria Arjona as Maddy, the woman looking to get her no-good husband knocked off. The pairing is unbelievably sexy, in a vintage screwball type of way. You can’t fake chemistry, and Powell and Arjona have enough spark to power a mid-sized American city.
Anyway, I see Powell as the Matthew McConaughey of his generation—though Linklater, who’s worked with them both, would beg to differ. “I know he shares the Texas thing, but Glen, his mind’s wired very differently than Matthew. I mean, they’re good-looking, hunky guys, for sure, but I don’t really think about that too much,” he told me. “I think what you’re really talking about is a kind of star charisma. That star quality that Glen has, Matthew has. They let you get away with a lot.”
**You Can Watch It Without Going Outside **
I saw Hit Man at a film festival in the fall, in a packed screening room with so much energy that I couldn’t remember the last time I had so much fun at the movies. So I, along with many others, was surprised—and somewhat bummed—when I learned that it would have a limited theatrical release before going straight to Netflix.
“Anyone could have picked it up. Netflix had the most passion for it. What can you say? From our perspective, it just goes to the most passionate person,” Linklater told me when I asked him about this. “Believe me, if anyone would have said, ‘We think this can gross $100 million. Glen’s a big star. We are going to put it in all these theaters…’ But no one made that offer, so the real question isn’t to me. It’s to all the distributors.”
On the other hand—you can just watch it! Right now! (It’s for sure a better option than Netflix’s other big release this week, about a big shark in the Seine terrorizing Paris.)
Plus, for what it’s worth, Linklater was pretty sanguine about the whole thing. “The reality is most films are seen ultimately, especially in the indie world, years later on video,” he said. “That’s been my whole career … mostly when someone comes up to you and says they like your movie, they saw it at home.”
