<\/p>\n
It is often said Hollywood doesn’t produce movie stars anymore.<\/p>\n
So when someone with a square jaw and loads of charisma like Glen Powell is cast in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role for a reboot of “The Running Man,” people get excited.<\/p>\n
But Powell, an unfailingly courteous Texan, who quit the Los Angeles life and moved home to Austin as his fame grew, is having none of it.<\/p>\n
“I don’t find myself to be exceptional,” the 37-year-old told AFP.<\/p>\n
“That era of action stars and movie stars? You can’t really compare apples to oranges,” Powell said.<\/p>\n
His role in the new “Running Man,” out on Friday, is certainly a far cry from the indestructible bluster of Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson’s 20th-century action heroes, who were usually soldiers, cops and trained fighters.<\/p>\n
Powell’s protagonist Ben Richards is an everyman, with no special skills beyond a rugged toughness and a very short fuse.<\/p>\n
He reluctantly enters a deadly game show in which the entire world is trying to kill him: he needs to survive long enough to win prize money and buy life-saving medicine for his daughter.<\/p>\n
“I’ve always identified myself as an underdog,” Powell said.<\/p>\n
“Some of my favorite movies are ordinary people against extraordinary odds. And you don’t get more ordinary than Ben.”<\/p>\n
The movie sees Powell’s hero get bashed and bruised, blown off a bridge, and has him abseiling down the side of a building in only a bath towel to escape from hoodlums.<\/p>\n
The night before his AFP interview, Powell and director Edgar Wright screened the movie for Schwarzenegger.<\/p>\n
Schwarzenegger’s response? “Oh, I feel so bad for you… It must have hurt!” Powell recalled.<\/p>\n
“Arnold knows the pain that it takes to do an action movie properly. It was pretty badass to get his blessing.”<\/p>\n
– ‘Carnage’ –<\/p>\n
The film hews more closely to the original Stephen King novel than its 1987 big-screen predecessor.<\/p>\n
Powell’s hero is pursued from city to city by professional killers. The contest’s producers are rigging each moment for maximum TV ratings.<\/p>\n
Eerily, King set his novel in the United States of 2025, a then-futuristic vision of divisive autocrats, deepfake videos, and a health care crisis that drives everyday people to extremes.<\/p>\n
Was it a stretch for Powell to imagine today’s public enjoying mayhem and slaughter, some of it fake and AI-generated, on their screens?<\/p>\n
“We do live in this TikTok universe,” Powell said.<\/p>\n
“We are seeing carnage… and yet we’re sort of away from it. You don’t engage with it as a human anymore.”<\/p>\n
Powell said he is regularly sent deepfake videos by people who have not questioned the veracity or source of the content.<\/p>\n
“That’s a really fun thing that we get to play with in this movie… ‘Where do you get the news from, and who is controlling information?'” Powell said.<\/p>\n
– ‘Wild West’ –<\/p>\n
Though he has been acting for years, Powell only shot to prominence as cocky fighter pilot Hangman in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”<\/p>\n
In a remarkable streak since, Powell appeared opposite Sydney Sweeney in rom-com “Anyone but You,” chased deadly storms in “Twisters,” and both co-wrote and starred in “Hit Man.”<\/p>\n
Up next, he will lead a new fantasy film from “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams. Powell’s production company has a deal with Universal Pictures.<\/p>\n
Those ventures into writing and producing are reminiscent of another classic action star, Stallone, who famously penned “Rocky” and insisted on being cast as the lead.<\/p>\n
“I really didn’t ever want to wait for the phone to ring. Because I realized it never will, at least not with the calls you want,” Powell said.<\/p>\n
“That’s sort of how I’ve moved through this town, trying to do it with a sense of initiative.<\/p>\n
“Hollywood, it’s the Wild West right now,” he added. “I can’t really look backwards.”<\/p>\n
amz\/hg\/sst\/ane<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is often said Hollywood doesn’t produce movie stars anymore. So when someone with a square jaw and loads of charisma like Glen Powell is cast in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role for a reboot of “The Running Man,” people get excited. But Powell, an unfailingly courteous Texan, who quit the Los Angeles life and moved home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2145919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[317505,345297,310317,100705],"class_list":["post-2145918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-arnold-schwarzenegger","tag-ben-richards","tag-glen-powell","tag-movie-stars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/The-ordinary-Arnie-Glen-Powell-reboots-The-Running-Man.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2145918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145920,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145918\/revisions\/2145920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2145919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2145918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2145918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2145918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}