Every Glen Powell Movie, Ranked

One of Powell’s very first big screen roles (he was only 16 when it debuted at SXSW in 2005, although it didn’t actually release in the U.S. until 2007) came in The Wendell Baker Story, a completely forgotten comedy from the mid 2000s where Luke Wilson plays an ex-convict trying to turn his life around. Powell played a paper boy who the main character runs off the road.

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Guys. We’re doing to have to be up front at this part of the list—some of these movies from a certain era of Powell’s career are bizarre, have a low budget, and are not executed particularly well. Red Wing—based on a French novel!— finds Powell as a foster child who gets involved in a love triangle with the couple that takes him in. It’s not great.

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Another movie that kind of gets a big “… huh?” reaction, Wind Walkers is a long-buried horror-adjacent thriller with far too much going on and very clear budgetary limitations. We can write this one off and you don’t have to think about it!

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In this very tiny indie Powell plays a Marine who just got back from the middle east, crashing a frenzied weekend getaway for a group of childhood friends in crisis. It’s not really clear what anything here is going for, and, honestly, it’s not great!

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While Powell has a real role in Misconduct—a 2016 thriller with a shockingly star-studded cast, including Josh Duhamel, Lee Byung-hun, Anthony Hopkins, and Al Pacino—it takes about 15 seconds of watching to realize this is a shockingly poor movie. To put it simply, the vibes and style are bizarre, and every line even from the very beginning is totally stilted and strange. It’s hardly anyone in the movie’s fault, but clearly something is very off. This is basically unwatchable.

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Powell plays the vaunted role of “Good Looking Frat Guy” in 2012’s rom-dram-com Stuck in Love, best known these days as something of a cult favorite Thanksgiving movie about a family of writers (also starring Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Connelly). He appears very briefly alongside Lily Collins.

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Ride Along 2 can kind of be a perfect encapsulation of how far Powell came in such a relatively short time. This movie is exactly what it sounds like: A silly action-comedy sequel starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. Powell plays Troy, a drug dealer with tattoos on his face who gets busted by our heroes early on in the movie. You kind of know what you’re going to get out of this, but it’s remarkable that this, while still a real role in a major studio film, is only a couple years before Powell would really start to define his star persona.

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Another very early (and very small) Powell role, The Hottest State is important for one major reason: Ethan Hawke. This is the adaptation of the beloved actor’s 1996 novel of the same name, and proved that major names and stars in the industry were at the very least trusting in the young Powell to be a part of their work. Powell and Hawke share a frequent collaborator in the great director Richard Linklater, whose work will appear a number more times on this list.

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Sex Ed is a comedy that follows Haley Joel Osment as a teacher who feels like he’s flailing through life and winds up teaching an inner-city class about sex education despite having, well, very little experience with the topic. Powell plays his charismatic roommate, JT. It’s a solid movie and a fun role for Powell, who gets to put his charm on display and have a good time on screen in a half-decent movie.

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Powell plays a very small role in Fast Food Nation as Steve, a friend of Paul Dano’s restaurant worker Brian, in Richard Linklater’s very solid docudrama about the fast food industry. While the role here is small, it’s vital—Powell and Linklater would eventually become trusted collaborators, and make some of Powell’s very best movies to date.

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Powell plays the vital role of “Trader #1” in this pre-fame appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel. He’s not in the movie very long, nor does he make a huge impact—he gets tossed around and knocked out by Tom Hardy’s villainous Bane. Still: The fact that a pre-breakout Powell got a Christopher Nolan movie under his belt (albeit in this kind of part) is no small feat, and only adds to the lore of his stardom.

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Powell plays another small role in The Great Debaters as Preston Whittington. This would be unremarkable and unimportant, but the movie was directed by the one and only Denzel Washington—a connection that proved vital for Powell in his career. “Denzel Washington really pushed me out of the nest a bit and said, ‘You should double-down on yourself. You should give this a shot,’” the star told Today back in 2024. “I’ve seen him since. He’s like, ‘You owe me. You owe me.’”

While we may not have much of an idea who he is, we may have to thank Preston Whittington for every Powell role that has since followed.

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Nicholas Hoult leads Sand Castle, a movie about a soldier in the Iraq War whose only investment is in order to pay off his own personal debts. In the film, Powell plays Sargeant Chutsky, who makes a major impact on the squad at the center of the story (and allows Powell to continue building the persona that would eventually make him a star). The movie has a really strong cast overall, including both Henry Cavill and Logan Marshall-Green in addition to Hoult and Powell.

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The title “The Expendables 3” kind of tells you all you need to know. It’s the third movie in the Expendables franchise, a series that brings together heavyweights like Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Jet Li, and more. Is it a great movie? No, it’s not. But I dare you to try to argue that being in a movie with all those people isn’t a net positive for a young actor’s career. Expendables 3 is a fun movie and is competent at what it’s going for, while also further helping to shape Powell into who he is today.

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This historical drama about a WWII book club follows a writer (Lily James) ensnared in a love triangle—and Powell plays her long-standing boyfriend. It’s a nice movie!

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Perhaps more important than the movie or role itself—although Apollo 10½ is a swell time—is the fact that this film once again marks Powell working with Richard Linklater, and even more notably, finds him working in the unique animation style that Linklater had previously dabbled in with his movies Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. It can be really fun for an actor to build a long-standing relationship with a great director, but when they start becoming a go-to collaborator and working with their experimental stuff (like Linklater also does with Ethan Hawke), you know it’s something special.

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In Hidden Figures, a perfectly solid historical drama about three Black women who worked at NASA during the space race (played by Taraji B. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae), Powell puts his charm to perfect use as the legendary astronaut John Glenn. It’s a small role, but it’s pretty perfect! The movie also includes Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, and Mahershala Ali among its cast. Not bad!

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Devotion kind of flies under the radar, likely because it was released in the same year as another Glen Powell aviation movie (which you’re surely aware of, and which we will talk about in just a little bit). Still, this rock-solid historical drama about pilots during the Korean War—which features Powell both as co-lead and producer, as he was a fan of the book and pushed for the film to be made—is worth your time if you’re into a classic war-adjacent dad movie.

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This team-up between Powell and director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Baby Driver) tackles the Stephen King novel of the same name which had previously been loosely adapted into an ’80s action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Powell steps into Arnold’s leading shoes here, and the movie is a fun enough time, although Powell abandons his usual wise-cracking, fun-loving persona for something a bit more intense and angry.

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