Glen Powell Wasn’t Sure that Top Gun: Maverick Was Going to Be a Hit

3 min readLegacy sequels don’t have an amazing track record at the box office. But in April 2022, as COVID-19 restrictions eased and nostalgia for the good ol’ times was at an all-time high, Top Gun: Maverick hit theaters and grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide. Tom Cruise’s return to the world of insanely fast fighter jets and shirtless beach sports was such a success that audiences and critics alike share the belief that the sequel—released 36 years after the original Top Gun—was even better than its predecessor.But if you ask Glen Powell, who became a real name in Hollywood following his role as pilot Jake "Hangman" Seresin in Maverick, the sequel didn’t feel like a sure thing. “Top Gun: Maverick seems obvious now, but it was not obvious at the time,” Powell told Esquire’s editor in chief Michael Sebastian in the latest episode of “What I’ve Learned.” According to the actor, Tom Cruise would even agree himself. “He said it was like hitting a bullet with a bullet.”And as crazy as it sounds, Powell originally turned down the Hangman role after he auditioned to play Rooster and didn’t get the part. Miles Teller got the role instead, and Powell envisioned the possibility that the screen time for Teller’s rival could “get diminished over the course of an edit.”But Tom Cruise is a persistent man. He told producer Jerry Bruckheimer that he wanted Powell for the role and the actor agreed to sit and talk with him again.“The only way you can collaborate with somebody is with pure honesty,” Powell says. “In that meeting with Tom, I was brutally honest about the movie because I was fully prepared to not be in it. I poked holes in everything, because it was like, what did I have to lose? And it ended up making us really good collaborators and really good friends. I started realizing that’s all he wants. He doesn’t want ‘Yes’ men around. He wants somebody who is going to challenge the script and make it better.”So, did Glen Powell save Top Gun: Maverick? You can watch the full interview for Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” below and decide for yourself.Elsewhere, Powell reveals that director J.J. Abrams pitched him the idea for his secretive sci-fi film, The Great Beyond, while he was storm chasing in Oklahoma for Twisters.“We became friends with all these real storm chasers after making the movie,” he says. “We were in the car, heading to chase a tornado, and I got a text from J.J. He said, ‘There’s a project that I have that I want to talk to you about. Are you around right now?’”“I just remember Daisy Edgar-Jones and our storm chaser friends are outside the car and the wind is whipping like crazy and I’m taking a call from J.J. Abrams,” he recalls, joking: “I was really trying to be as quick as possible so that they didn’t get swept up into everything.”Before The Great Beyond hits theaters a year from now on October 1, 2027, audiences will see Powell onscreen again in February, when he stars in Judd Apatow’s The Comeback King. The comedy co-starring Cristin Milioti, Madelyn Cline, and Stavros Halkias follows a successful country singer who returns to college to finish his degree.