Glen Powell Was Grateful for 2012 Role on ‘NCIS’: ‘Kept Me Afloat’
These days, Glen Powell is one of the most recognizable actors in Hollywood. But it took the 36-year-old star of Twisters a long time to reach his current level of fame. He spent years racking up minor credits in movies like Fast Food Nation and The Dark Knight Rises and shows like Without a Trace and CSI: Miami before achieving more significant success. While the work wasn’t always glamorous, Powell says he was grateful to get it.
Glen Powell was in two episodes of ‘NCIS’
One of the small parts that Powell landed early in his career was a brief stint on NCIS. In the two-part 2012 episode “Shell Shock,” he played a Marine with PTSD named Joe Wescott whose friend is murdered.
Roles like the one he had in NCIS allowed Powell to keep his dream of an acting career alive, he told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. But they’re much harder to come by now, which makes things even tougher for aspiring actors.
“That’s the other interesting thing about this business right now—how much it’s changing,” he said. “The business no longer supports struggling actors the way it did when I was kind of coming up. I would do an episode of NCIS, and that would keep me afloat for a year. You know what I mean?”
Powell went on to say that while he wasn’t making a lot of money, it was enough to get by.
“You’re not living a lavish lifestyle. You’re hiding a flask in your boot if you go out for a drink. You’re not necessarily able to afford anything significant in that town, but you are able to stay there,” he said. “Those little jobs, like getting a commercial, keep life in the system.”
The ‘Twisters’ star compared trying to make it in Hollywood to playing roulette
A few years after his NCIS appearance, Powell’s career started to pick up. In 2016, he had a prominent role in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and played astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures. He starred in Set It Up and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society before going on to star in blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters. It’s a far cry from where he was in his 20s.
“As a struggling actor, there’s no harder place to live than being in Hollywood with nothing going on … Where people can get caught in a rut is where they just want to continue spinning the roulette wheel without any thought of why,” Powell said. “They just stay at the table for no reason other than to stay at the table.”
To get where he is today, Powell convinced himself that the tough times were only temporary.
“Even at the darkest moments in that town, when I really didn’t have anything happening, you sort of have to lie to yourself, at least a little bit, and act like this is that chapter of the story where things just aren’t going right. You have to believe in the Hollywood legends of those people that you admire, the people that you’re chasing, that had those long stretches of famine as well.”
Now that he’s on top, Powell is mindful about not getting caught up in playing the role of a leading man.
“I’ve failed for a lot longer than I’ve succeeded,” he said. “I’ve really gotten a chance to see other people do it. And what I realized is, I think the trap is trying to fit into the mold of something like that where it’s inauthentic.”
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