Yes, Glen Powell Would Trade a Golden Globe for a Texas National Championship

Glen Powell is still catching his breath when he comes to the phone Sunday, just hours before he’ll hit the red carpet at the Golden Globes. He’s nominated for the first time in the Lead Actor category for Hit Man, a movie he co-wrote and another piece of evidence that Powell knows more about refreshing the rom-com genre than 99% of Hollywood. I wonder if nerves are setting in before the big night, causing the minor panting, but he assures me he’s feeling pretty chill about the whole thing. The cause of the shortness of breath is that even though it’s still only Sunday morning in Los Angeles, Powell and his family have already started getting ready for the night in true action-hero style. Just three minutes before our call, Powell says, he emerged from the plunge pool with his sister after a session in the sauna. They were at the gym before that, and the whole Powell family already ran hills together, too. “I was like, shivering at the beginning of the call,” he relays in his friendly Texan-twinged accent.

Powell knows the most important parts of looking great in a tuxedo are done outside the stylist’s quarters and hair-and-makeup chair. Actually, the process of getting into the tuxedo and onto the red carpet starts many years earlier. Powell began writing Hit Man at the start of the pandemic. He realized it was a moment “you either downshift or you throttle up, and I decided to throttle up,” Powell says. When the actor found a decades-old Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, the police investigator he would base the story around, he started crafting the script while everyone else was learning to knead sourdough.

His initiative paid off; Hit Man eventually became Powell's second collaboration with Richard Linklater (who cowrote and directed) and earned him a Best Actor nomination at the Globes. It's a neat summation of his time in Hollywood. It's clear he and his action-chasing Twisters character have more in common than a love for cowboy hats. “This town [Los Angeles] was never going to give me anything,” he says. “I was very frustrated immediately and realized, ‘Okay, I can't wait for the phone to ring I'm going to have to either pick it up and dial myself, or I'm just going to have to create this thing myself.’ I didn't wait for things to happen, I always woke up and made them happen.”

The actor’s still “trying to do a better job of reaching out to people and raising my hand on things,” he says, and he's got his sights set high. He lists out directors he dreams of working with: Steven Spielberg; Ed Berger, who just made awards-season favorite Conclave; Dune’s Denis Villeneuve; and Taika Waititi.

To get to and look great on the red carpet, it takes running up hills—both metaphorical and literal ones—but an awesome tuxedo doesn’t hurt, either. Powell’s enlisted an old friend in Armani for Sunday’s Golden Globes. The designer has supported the actor long before he became Hollywood’s friendliest hunk. “They let me borrow some tuxes and clothes and things like that to at least look the part [for the premieres of Everybody Wants Some!! and Scream Queens].” Powell’s not necessarily trying to pay back that loyalty as much as embrace the full-circle moment of wearing the brand that helped him get started now that he’s a Globe nominee; the fact that Armani softly-tailored ‘90s-tinged suits continue to rate red-hot on the hype scale doesn't hurt. “Armani is just having a really cool moment,” Powell says.

Powell’s Armani embraces the funkier side of tailoring that’s driven much of its recent appeal. “Sometimes it's fun to wear just a classic tuxedo,” he says, “but then there's something to saying, ‘No, I don't think I need a tie—let's just do a chain and show a little chest hair and hit the dance floor with a different level of swagger.’” When Powell hits the red carpet Sunday night, the chain, from David Yurman, is visible, but the chest hair is still buttoned up.

Powell's tux is after-party-ready, though; Armani’s outfitted him with peak lapels sharp enough he could probably try his hand as a real-life hitman if he were inclined. The velvet suit, Powell says, is made for “a normal American” rather than “runway models.” I rebuff Powell’s attempt at modesty—no “normal American” makes people riotous about white tees—but he insists: “It's not tailored to an inch of your life where it's only meant to be stood in,” he says. “You can be on a dance floor and pull out all the moves.”

Photographer Christian Hogstedt

The rest of Powell’s Golden Globes routine isn’t all that elaborate. When I ask if he’ll be confined to a chair getting his hair teased into the exact right position or his face powdered just so, he scoffs. “A couple hours? No, I wore prosthetics on Chad Powers, [a new show in which Powell plays a disgraced college quarterback] and it didn't even take me an hour to get a new face,” he says. It may be Hollywood’s second-biggest night, but he’s keeping the rest of his plans low-key—maybe a celebratory drink with friends beforehand, and that’s about it. “I definitely can't say it's another day, but it's not something I think I've overly thought about in terms of the nominee aspect,” he says.

It’s only when I ask about Powell’s University of Texas playing Ohio State in the College Football Playoff later this week that he starts to get serious. He relays stories of testing his dad, an OSU alum, with Meet-the-Parents-style tests: feeling the pulse on his wrist while making him swear he’d be rooting for the Longhorns with the rest of the family. He starts to get romantic about quarterback Quinn Ewers staving off the team’s previous opponent and the “magic,” as he describes it, on this year’s squad. “I don't know if there's a single award out there that would make me more happy than that Longhorns winning a National Championship,” he says.

Is that in reference to tonight? I ask.

“Honestly, if it's a tradeoff between a Globe and a National Championship,” Powell says. “I’m definitely taking the National Championship.”