Glen Powell is no overnight sensation, remember Scream Queens and Set It Up?

For a lot of people, Glen Powell came out of nowhere.

With his big toothy grin, that mischievous twinkle in his eye and his adorable rescue pup Brisket, Powell is taking over cinema and your Instagram feeds.

There’s no doubt the Texan Powell is having a spectacular year. He’s had three high-profile movie releases in the past nine months — disaster movie Twisters, the Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You, and as a chameleonic fake assassin in Hit Man, which he co-wrote.

And he’s been on the cover of GQ and The Hollywood Reporter, and Vox asked “Can Glen Powell be a movie star in a post-movie-star era?”

It’s partly to do with his role in Twisters, a brash but smart and kind-hearted “hillbilly” storm chaser who exudes energy, sending rockets up a tornado’s funnel while still playing the sensitive romantic lead. It helps that Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung put him in a white t-shirt and cowboy hat in a rain-soaked scene.

And it’s partly to do with Powell’s sincere swagger on the publicity trail. There’s something refreshing about his earnestness, not trying to be too cool for the whole commercial side of movies and filmmaking.

He’s not a tortured artist but he is methodical, and now that he has the industry banging on his door, he has turned down roles in the next Bourne and Jurassic Park movies because he didn’t think they were right for him.

He once told Tom Cruise that he was “working to try to be you”. In July, Cruise turned up to the London premiere of Twisters in support of his Top Gun: Maverick co-star and mentee.

He posts videos of him and his Twisters co-stars doing Charli XCX’s Apple dance, brings his parents to his premieres where they hold up ironic signs that say, “Stop trying to make Glen Powell happen,” and has a separate Instagram account for Brisket, the terrier poodle mix he adopted a year ago while going through a breakup.

He looks like he’s having fun, and that he wants you to have fun. Despite all the hand-wringing that Powell’s all-American vibe and blockbuster appeal belong to a bygone era of cinema culture, at least for 2024, this is his moment.

The influx of Glen Powell-ness can seem like a lot all of a sudden but the 35-year-old is no overnight sensation. Powell has been both sporadically and steadily working in the business for over two decades.

His first role was “long-fingered boy” in one scene in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, directed by Robert Rodriguez. He was 13 years old and it was unmemorable for anyone not Powell. But the bug bit and he landed small roles in Luke and Andrew Wilson’s The Wendell Baker Story and Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. All three productions were helmed by Texan natives.

He unsuccessfully auditioned for Friday Night Lights “three or four times” but convinced Denzel Washington to cast him in The Great Debaters in 2007, and from that relationship he nabbed a Hollywood agent.

A CSI: Miami episode here, a “Trader #1” credit on The Dark Knight Rises there, and things happened very slowly for Powell. Most people didn’t really notice him until Top Gun: Maverick was released in 2022, and even then, Powell didn’t become a household name, he was “that guy from Top Gun, you know, he played the updated version of Val Kilmer’s character”.

But if you had been paying attention, Powell has been showing us what he can do for quite a while now, in roles that should have earned him more attention before now.

There was the supporting role of astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures, the jilted GI fiancé in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and as a moustachioed college baseball player in the 1980s-set coming-of-age story Everybody Wants Some, reuniting him with Linklater.

But around that time in the mid-noughties, there were two roles that feel quintessential Powell in retrospect. They both take full advantage of his comedic timing and his willingness to be goofy and play the fool, which is part of his innate charm.

We’re talking about Set it Up and Scream Queens, which both reward a rewatch, or even first watch.

Scream Queens was a Ryan Murphy joint, which he co-created with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. The camp horror comedy is operating at heightened levels of absurdism and ridiculousness, with which Powell was definitely vibing.

The first season was set on an American university campus, most centred on a sorority house with a deadly past that comes back to haunt its present-day queen bee of mean, Chanel (Emma Roberts). Limbs flail, bodies pile up and its cutting dialogue only amps up with every venomous line.

In this silly tableau, Powell is really, really funny as Chad Radwell, the stereotypical privileged white boy whose male relatives are named Brad, Tad and Thad (yes, it’s that kind of show) and who is introduced hitting golf balls at hippies on the campus lawn while giving a sermon on why he can’t date a “garbage person”.

Bordering on pantomime at times, Powell’s performance is perfectly pitched with the ludicrousness of his character. He’s not precious about looking like an idiot or an arsehole and that lack of pretension has become part of his off-camera reputation.

Then there is, of course, Set It Up. The Netflix rom-com starred him and Zoey Deutch as two overworked and ambitious assistants who decide to parent-trap their nightmare bosses to fall in love so they can reclaim some spare time for themselves.

Naturally, they start to fall for each other and what was meant to be them playing Cupid ended up flinging those arrows their own way.

He and Deutch have sparkling chemistry and the pit-a-pat rhythm of classic screwball rom-com. One of the reasons (and there are many) why Anyone But You is so disappointing is because we have seen Powell on fire in Set It Up, a far better example of the genre.

As Charlie, who desperately wants to be successful like his venture capitalist boss, Powell has that honesty about what he wants, but then the vulnerability that comes with realising that his life goals were maybe not it. Plus, he and Deutch really are so winning together.

They’re not necessarily going to be the defining performances of Powell’s career, but those earlier roles reveal an actor who has been here all along, honing his craft and having bucketloads of fun.

Set It Up is on Netflix and Scream Queens is on Disney+