The Best Glen Powell Movies, Ranked — From 'Top Gun' to 'Hit Man'
This article has been updated by Rory O'Connor.
A screen actor since the age of 15, Glen Powell is no stranger to the Hollywood industry, but he’s had to wait some time for fame to arrive. The Texas-born star first began to catch the eye with small parts in films like The Dark Knight Rises (in which he briefly appears as a stockbroker who gets on the wrong side of Bane) and The Expendables 3, but the last few years have seen his star steadily rise after landing his first major role as Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin in the hugely successful and critically acclaimed Top Gun: Maverick.
In the list below, which I’ve ranked in ascending order, you‘ll find all of Powell’s best performances to date. Read on to learn a bit more about them and use the guide below to find out everything you need to know about how to stream them online across platforms such as Disney+, Sky, Apple TV, and more!
One year on from Maverick, Powell took on his first major leading role as Garry Johnson in Hit Man, a funny, sexy and wonderfully entertaining crime caper from his friend and collaborator Richard Linklater that remains, IMO, the high watermark of his career.
The film follows the incredible true story of a seemingly unremarkable professor who moonlights as a fake hit man in order to entrap the people who hire him for his services. The moral ambiguities of his choices are never really explored in the movie, but the part allowed Powell to play dress-up in a bunch of whacky costumes and show off his comedy chops while also enjoying a sizzling love affair with Adria Arjona. Even writing about it makes me want to put it on. I highly recommend you do the same.
In 2022, Glen Powell hit the big time when he starred opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, a film that even Steven Spielberg claimed was responsible for saving cinema after the Covid lockdown.
For the film, Powell played Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin, a swaggering elite aviator whose competitive nature makes him both a chief antagonist to Miles Teller’s Rooster and an ally. Think of it this way, if Rooster is this movie’s version of Maverick, then Powell’s handsome flyboy is Val Kilmer’s Goose.
After playing a series of smaller parts across film and television through the early 2000s, Powell got his first big part in the television series Scream Queens, playing the outrageously cocky frat boy Chad Radwell. A few months later, Powell played a more likable version of this role in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, a beautifully nostalgic film about baseball scholarship bros in 1980s Texas that felt like a companion piece to the director’s ‘90s classic Dazed and Confused.
Powell mightn’t have been playing the lead in this one, but the impact that the film had on his career makes it more than deserving of third place on this list. It also began a fruitful relationship with Linklater that has resulted in three wonderful movies so far.
In 2024, Powell put his leading man credentials to the test when he starred opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones as ‘tornado wrangler’ Tyler Owens in Twisters, a high octane sequel to 1996’s Twister from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung.
The film is an action-packed story of storm chasing in Oklahoma that also worked as a kind of odd couple rom-com between its two beautiful stars. In fact, Powell and Edgar-Jones have such good chemistry that some viewers were low-key outraged that Chung decided not to have them kiss on screen. A good time at the movies, none the less.
Given his most obvious qualities as an actor, it’s no surprise that Powell has already tried his hand in a few rom-coms. His first high profile attempt was 2018’s Set It Up, but Anyone but You has been his biggest so far — unless you happen to include the number 1 film on this list. For Anyone but You, Powell and Sydney Sweeney star as two seemingly opposite people who pretend to be a couple for mutually beneficial reasons, a deal which takes them to a wedding in Australia — where of course they end up falling for each other.
The chemistry might not fizz as much as you’d like it to, but this is just the kind of fun and raunchy movie (think 40 Days and 40 Nights, My Best Friend’s Wedding) that Hollywood used to crank out on an annual basis. We welcome its return.
The second best of Powell’s lead roles in the last few years came in a film that, for whatever reason, failed to really find an audience. This is a bit of a shame, as the setup for How to Make a Killing — in which Powell plays a man who is last line to inherit a fortune and so decides to take out the family members in his way — is kind of a doozy.
If you liked the capitalist satire of Park Chan Wook’s recent film No Other Choice, there’s a good chance you’ll vibe with this one too.
Since 2024, filmmakers have been trying to find out how best to use Powell’s particular skills as an actor. Since then, he’s played the leading man three times in a row in three quite different parts, and each to varying degrees of success. The least effective of these was Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a remake of the 1987 Arnie classic about a dystopian game show where the contestants attempt to survive while being hunted down on live TV.
Without much of a character to work with, Powell is left to rely on physical technique — which mostly consists of him aping for the camera in video messages, taking his shirt off and, you guessed it, running. And yes, there are worse ways to spend an evening.
2016 turned out to be a landmark year for the then 28-year-old actor. After charming arthouse audiences with Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some (more on that one shortly) he went two-for-two with his charismatic turn as astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures.
The film covers the largely untold story of the women of colour who helped to get the Apollo missions off the ground in the 1960s. Whether you’re looking for the feel-good mood of films like The Monuments Men or appreciate the revisionist history approach of something like The Imitation Game, it’s a nice watch for a rainy Sunday afternoon.
The most recent release on our rundown of Powell performances is his charming vocal turn as Fox McCloud in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Similar to the first installment in the franchise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, critics have been a little lukewarm on this one so far, but the casting of Powell — an actor best known for playing fighter pilots — as the hero of the beloved Star Fox video game is a nice touch. If you’re particularly nostalgic for that era of Nintendo games, you’ll find plenty to enjoy.
The story follows Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi as they travel through space to save Peach from Bowser. Chris Pratt, Jack Black and Anya Taylor Joy round out the A-list cast.
Around the filming Top Gun: Maverick, Powell started to have his pick of juicy roles. One of the most interesting came opposite Jonathan Majors in Devotion, a film based on the true story of two pilots during the Korean War.
Given everything that’s happened with Majors, it’s no surprise that this one flew a bit under the radar, but if you’re a fan of shows like Masters of the Air or The Pacific, it’s worth seeking out for Powell’s performance. He certainly looks the part.
