He’ll always be your hangman, but Glen Powell had a hard time finding any purpose in playing Jake “Hangman” Seresin in this year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
“Hangman” served as a nemesis to Mile Teller’s Jake “Rooster” Bradshaw, son of the late Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (played by Anthony Edwards in 1986’s Top Gun) and Glen Powell felt that was about the extent of his character. “He was there to add conflict to Rooster’s character, which is a good thing, but he wasn’t three-dimensional and he had no pay off. I didn’t know why he existed.”
But it was while filming Top Gun: Maverick that Powell got advice from, well, Maverick. Powell recalled Tom Cruise telling him, “It’s not that I need people to root for you, but I need them to love watching you…In some places in the world, this piece of body language will turn them off emotionally to your character.”
From there, Glen Powell could stop referring to his character as “Navy Draco Malfoy” and “dick garnish”, whatever he means by that. “In hindsight, I’m like, God, I can’t imagine if I missed out on this one, but it wasn’t so obvious.”
Glen Powell has had a consistent career so far, with a major role on Fox’s Scream Queens, playing John Glenn as part of the Screen Actors Guild Award-winning cast of Hidden Figures and landing a pair of Richard Linklater movie. But Top Gun: Maverick’s box office nearly $1.5 billion worldwide haul and placement as the fifth highest-grossing movie ever has afforded him even more opportunities. Powell is set to play the Sundance Kid to Regé-Jean Page’s Butch Cassidy in an upcoming Amazon series.
What did you think of Glen Powell and his character in Top Gun: Maverick? Did he have more dimension that originally thought? Let us know below!
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