Brolin told a story about Powell getting ready for a scene they were doing together. “Glen is sitting there over and over, slamming his fist down on his thigh, and I’m like, ‘Goddamn, let up on yourself, dude.’ But: into it! Works himself into a state. And that can be embarrassing.” At a glance, something like The Running Man, Brolin said, could seem superficial—nothing to get worked up over. “You’re like, ‘Hey, man, it’s The Running Man, relax.’ You know? ‘It’s Big Top Pee-wee, it’s okay.’ And it’s not that. And he refuses to do that. And I don’t care if you’re cold plunging every morning, I don’t care what it is. I just want to see you doing it. I just want to see you proving to yourself that you’re there for real.”
One morning in Glasgow, Powell and his driver picked me up from my hotel. On our way to breakfast, we passed more locations for the J.J. Abrams film Powell was currently shooting. Powell said he had recently been negotiating with his home state to make it more possible for productions to shoot there. “There’s a few things in the deal points that I’m trying to get amended a bit, but Texas just passed a massive film incentive,” he said.
I asked Powell if he had elected himself to this role as Hollywood ambassador to the state, or whether he’d been asked to help. “I went to the Capitol when, probably when I was 17, 16, to talk about the incentives.” But, he said, “It is only now that I feel like I’m sort of one of the maybe four or five people that represent Texas in Hollywood that they’ve sort of been like, ‘Hey, we need you. It’s you. McConaughey, Woody, Owen.’ There’s not that many of ’em.”
The car pulled up to a restaurant on the east side of Glasgow’s downtown. When we walked in, the restaurant staff audibly giggled at the sight of Powell. We sat down and looked at the menu. “Would you mind, would it be annoying if I did sort of a customized version?” Powell asked the waiter.
One of the many ways that Powell symbolizes the peculiar dilemmas of modern manhood is the intense and deliberate way he takes care of himself and his body. He is a bona fide bro from Austin—increasingly, America’s home of a familiar strain of male optimization—who cold plunges, infrared saunas, and, on a nearly daily basis, submerges his face into a bowl of ice cubes.
In The Running Man, Powell does many of his own stunts. “I knew that based on the Stephen King book, Ben Richards was a tank,” Powell said about his character in the film. So Powell, with the guidance of Cruise, who taught him how to outline and prepare for the major stunts in a film, worked to become a tank. “I was like, Okay, I got to be a bit of a weapon. And so that’s why I trained the way I trained on this. I put on a lot of muscle. A lot of it was functional. A lot of it was so I could absorb hits. But a lot of it was also authentically for an audience.” It was Cruise who taught Powell to think about the job of acting as an inherently physical one. “I went from going, ‘Oh, I’m an actor on a movie,’ to ‘I’m a high-performance athlete,’ ” Powell told me. “And I’m just very lucky that I have someone like Tom who I could literally go, ‘Hey, what do I do to survive something?’ ”