Brioni Taps Glen Powell for Fall Ad Campaign

Written by jen on September 05 2023

Photoshoots > Advertisement Campaigns > Brioni > 2023 Fall/Winter Campaign > Photoshoot

WWD – The American actor best known for his role in “Top Gun: Maverick,” fronts the brand’s fall campaign focused on the bespoke service.
NEW STAR: Furthering its link with Hollywood stars, Brioni has tapped actor and producer Glen Powell to front its latest campaign.

Dedicated to the Rome-based menswear brand’s bespoke service section of the fall 2023 collection, the cinematic black-and-white images were captured in Los Angeles by photographer Gregory Harris, who reprised his lensman role for the house.

The Austin, Texas-born actor has most recently starred in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel to the blockbuster 1986 “Top Gun,” as pilot Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin. He previously landed roles in such movies as “Hidden Figures,” “Everybody Wants Some” and “Expendables 3.”

Later this year he is starring in “Anyone But You,” a romantic comedy directed and cowritten by Will Gluck, alongside “Euphoria” star and fashion favorite Sydney Sweeney.

The Brioni campaign shows the actor sporting tailored pieces and donning several interpretations of the brand’s sartorialwear – from suited-up, seen in a three-piece suit worn with a tie, to laid-back and relaxed, such as a gray suit worn with a simple T-shirt.

A behind-the-scenes video showcases Powell enjoying Brioni’s bespoke service, his measurements taken by one of the brand’s tailors to create a custom Brioni for Glen Powell-labeled suit.

Although he was not named an ambassador to Brioni, Powell follows in the footsteps of marquee Hollywood stars who have had ties with the Italian men’s luxury label. They include Jude Law and his son Raff who were named house ambassadors in 2022; Brad Pitt; Pierce Brosnan; Anthony Hopkins, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Kering, then called PPR, acquired Brioni in 2011 from the descendants of the company’s founders, Nazareno Fonticoli and Gaetano Savini.

Glen Powell Teams With Richard Linklater For A (Sort Of) True Comedy Noir Thriller Romance That Hits The Target

Written by jen on September 05 2023

Hit Man debuts on Rotten Tomatoes with a perfect score!

Film Review from Venice:

DEADLINE – It was 22 years ago that Skip Hollandsworth wrote a Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a school teacher who moonlights as a hit man who doesn’t kill people. Now if that doesn’t sound like the formula for a hit movie, you may understand why it has taken so long for Gary’s story to make it to the silver screen — so long in fact that its subject passed away before he could hit the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival, where the film is having its world premiere tonight.

Nevertheless, Glen Powell never forgot the story and has teamed with Richard Linklater to finally tell it, though it is only “loosely” based on the original article. Certain details in the screenplay co-written by Linklater and Powell are made up, and those are the details that actually help make this a hilarious winner, as well as perhaps Linklater’s most commercial movie since School of Rock. Its quirky true crime element also has a bit in common with Linklater’s Bernie, which starred Jack Black. The director seems drawn to this kind of offbeat tale, with some level of truth to it.

Powell plays the role of Gary Johnson, who works part-time for the New Orleans Police Department as a fake hit man, a master of disguise who with the unit assigned to him sets up lots of unsuspecting marks by agreeing to kill whatever friend, loved one, relative or other person they want offed. Wired and ready to pounce, Johnson simply gets them to say the magic words about wanting him to commit the murder and voila, they are arrested. The film’s opening half hour has Powell, almost in Peter Sellers mode, disguising himself in different getups to trap various targets who don’t know what they are getting into. In real life, Johnson nailed about 70 people desiring his services to kill on their behalf.

Where the movie takes its own course is when Johnson, using his fake name of Ron, becomes attracted to a beautiful woman named Madison (Adria Arjona), who is trying to hire him to kill her abusive husband. He actually shows some humanity by convincing her it would not be worth the risk to go through with it, much to the disdain of his co-workers in the van listening in and wondering why he let this one get away. That becomes obvious when he begins secretly dating her but under his pseudonym of Ron, now posing as the fake hit man in the pursuit of a new romance, but of course not letting on to his colleagues that he is doing this as it obviously would be unprofessional.

One of those colleagues, Jasper (Austin Amelio), is jealous of Gary as he wants the job and is only his #2. He begins to suspect that something is up, and if he can prove it he knows it will be the end of the line for Gary. It all becomes complicated when Madison’s jerk of a husband Ray (Evan Holtzman) confronts the pair as they are out on a date. Soon and coincidentally, the NOPD team gets a new customer. Guess who? Now it is Gary who has to turn up to take the job offer for a hit on his wife from Ray, who later turns up mysteriously dead. What has happened? Who did it? Suddenly, Hit Man has the elements of a noirish mystery.

Linklater knows just exactly how keep all the balls in the air of this complex story of a hit man who wasn’t a real hit man who just could become a hit man all in the name of love. Billy Wilder would have loved it because it is bordering on Double Indemnity territory. Powell is the perfect fit for this leading role, and clearly he knew it as he also writes and produces with Linklater. He makes all the disguises and changing circumstances seem effortless to navigate. Arjona is a beauty and plays off him nicely with good chemistry between the pair. Amelio is a hoot, the guy who we need to hate here. Retta as Claudette and Sanjay Rao as Phil make up the rest of Gary’s team and they all blend together.

Producers are Mike Blizzard, Linklater, Powell, Jason Bateman and Michael Costigan. The film next heads to the Toronto Film Festival and is a hot market item no doubt. This one is a sleeper and real crowd pleaser.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man Gets Inside the Mind of a Faux Killer for Hire

Written by jen on September 01 2023

Film Productions > 2023 | Hitman > Stills

VANITY FAIR – The director and Glen Powell team up for this noir action-comedy based on a true story about a man with many personas.
Texas Monthly’s October 2001 piece “Hit Man” found an immediate fan in writer-director Richard Linklater, captivated by the story of Gary Johnson, a supposed contract killer in Houston who was actually working with law enforcement. The colorful piece by Skip Hollandsworth portrays a man who was a master of disguises and creating characters in order to convince his clients that he was a cold-blooded killer for hire. “I love this character, but I wasn’t sure of the movie,” Linklater, a Texas native, tells Vanity Fair. “We’ve got a great character, great incidents, great moments, all these great characters, but I didn’t know if it really went anywhere.”

Linklater, who previously adapted another Hollandsworth article into his 2011 black comedy, Bernie, starring Jack Black, loved the strange, funny situations Johnson would find himself in, but he wasn’t ever able to figure out a third act for the story. “I’d had meetings on it over the years and stuff, but it just never really went anywhere,” he says. “It just didn’t cohere as a story.”

Then, during the beginning of the pandemic, his friend and Everybody Wants Some!! star Glen Powell asked him if he’d ever heard of the “Hit Man” story in Texas Monthly. They started spitballing ideas and had their epiphany: The story could go a new, fictional direction based on a small moment toward the end of the article. Finally, they had their third act, and built a genre-bending film that is at times noir, comedy, romance, and thriller. And with a complicated character at the center of it for Powell to dig his teeth into as a leading man, Hit Man also explores deeper themes. “It seemed to be all about identity,” says Linklater of Hit Man, which will debut at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4. “He’s playing these characters, he’s undercover. Who is he?”

“In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script,” Hollandsworth writes in his article. He describes Johnson as a chameleon who is able to shift his characters based on the type of client he’s meeting. The sting was simple: Johnson would meet with a potential client and get the client to verbally confirm they were hiring Johnson to murder someone. Their entire conversation would be recorded, and used as evidence. After Johnson left the meeting, the client would be arrested.

For Powell, who cowrote the script with Linklater, the dark comedy, which is set in New Orleans, was an opportunity to play a character who was often playing a character. Sometimes “there was just a whole blurry line between Gary and Ron, which increased over time,” says Linklater.

In the film, “Ron” is one of Johnson’s personas that he uses when meeting a potential client. He’s Ron when he meets a beautiful woman (Adria Arjona) who wants her controlling husband killed. But Gary feels sympathetic toward her, and advises her to leave him rather than have him killed. From there, Gary—still pretending he’s Ron—is pulled into a complicated ruse when he continues to interact with the woman and their lives get more and more entangled.

Ron, a charismatic, confident man with a dark side, couldn’t be more different than Gary, a mild-mannered teacher in his real life, when he’s not moonlighting as a cold-blooded killer. “Glen, the thorough professional he is, was reading books on body language and he thought Ron would walk a little different than Gary, and he also had a lot of fun with the accents,” says Linklater. “Every movie needs something that’s kind of difficult to pull off or something that seems especially challenging.”

As research, Linklater and Powell listened to the recordings of Johnson’s sting operations, meeting a cast of unbelievable characters who felt almost too strange to be real—and perfect for film. “We could have done a lot more of those,” says Linklater of capturing the wide range of clients hoping to take out a hit. “There’s an alternate movie that’s just all these people at that moment. These rich society ladies, with their nice dresses, sitting down in a nice hotel room talking about how to kill their rich husband they’re sick of.”

Linklater found the conversations fascinating because the clients were having these life-and-death discussions “so matter of factly,” he says. “It’s almost like they’re all acting in their own little crime movie when someone’s suddenly working with a mobster. I thought it was all so dark and funny in the strangest way.”

Linklater was also able to speak with Johnson on the phone while working on the script. For being an undercover hit man, he was surprisingly well-known, attending court proceedings and being featured in news articles. “It was like two different worlds,” explains Linklater. “People that are doing the hits aren’t reading the paper.”

Linklater describes Johnson as “the chillest dude imaginable” who had no issues with his story being told in a film. “He was just the most nonplussed guy,” he says. “We would talk about baseball or something, but he was a man of few words actually.”

When Linklater was about to start filming, he tried to reach out to Johnson again to let him know it was finally happening. But when he couldn’t get in touch with him, he found out from Hollandsworth that he had died.

But Johnson’s story lives on, even as fiction. With Hit Man, Linklater is able to go beyond a quirky framing device to look at how one individual gets lost in the many personalities he takes on, and may be able to change for the better because of it. “How much can we change? Can you change? Are we fixed as people?” says Linklater. “At times, I felt I have changed a lot. No one seems to notice.… But I think that you kind of can change. You can be better. It’s worth trying at least.”

Hit Man will debut at the Venice International Film Festival on September 4 and the Toronto Film Festival on September 11. It is currently seeking US distribution.

Glen Powell Covers Nobleman

Written by jen on July 25 2023

Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session 037

Order your print copy of the issue for the entire article at the Nobleman Magazine website.

NOBLEMAN – With a sharp grin and a sense of humor as dry as the air in this beautiful Bel Air mansion, Glen Powell enters the room. He is contained, but yet still abounding with life. The Texas-born Powell has been steadily climbing into the screens since 2016. But as of late, he has solidified his stake in our hearts with his role as “Hangman” in Top Gun: Maverick, the resurrection sequel to the iconic 80’s film Top Gun.

Glen Powell showed up to the shoot looking the best out of all of us. “Style is deliberate”, he would later tell us. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. How I dress shows how much I care about it.” This is one of the many glimpses of his humility and thoughtfulness. He shows immense intentionality in all he does. Glen is more than just one thing, he truly is a Renaissance man. He can put on any hat and have you admire how seamless the transition would be.

The beautiful Bel Air estate we found ourselves sharing moments with was a perfect reflection of Powell himself. The subtle and strong mix of modern architecture swirled together with the nostalgic whispers of the past. The hand-in-hand combination of complexity and comfort. You can feel the same way when you meet with Glen, taken back by how he commands a room but also how he makes you feel like the only one in it.

As we sat with him, he held nothing back in his answers. Made thoughtful and authentic quips, and was genuinely excited to be with us like we were a part of the Powell family sitting by a fire at his family’s ranch. Powell tells us behind-the-scenes stories from Top Gun: Maverick, as well as gives a look into what’s coming next for him. All mixed with reminiscing about his family and travels.

How would you define a NOBLEMAN?
Glen Powell: I’ve always been attracted to people that are kind of unapologetically passionate about everything. When they like something, whether it’s traveling, cars, watches, or even sports. If you’re passionate about it, it’s cool. I always find that passionate people are always the most interesting. Their passion usually results in having the most style, and being wise because they’re curious about the world.

Has there been someone in your life that had that passion in a field that helped inspire you to be where you are now?
I instantly think about my parents. They were always supportive and let me be a little lost in life. Growing up, I always had an interest in all sorts of different things. If I wanted to play a sport, or if I wanted to play an instrument, or whatever, they let me follow my passions. I feel like it resulted in becoming good at a lot of different things and knowing a little about a lot. You just become more curious about the world and nothing seems scary. I remember my parents would put me in a room with people who are really accomplished. Just so that I would be able to converse with them.

One of my favorite things my parents did growing up is they would book the beginning of a trip and the end of a trip, and everything in the middle was an adventure. Our vacations were all about discovering new places and cuisines. It was all about chasing whatever you wanted to chase. You wouldn’t get locked into an itinerary, like during the trip you would actually find what was the most interesting thing to you throughout that trip and it made the world so much more exciting. You were getting dragged around by your parents in some random city. But you were empowered to chase it rather than just experience it.

It’s good to keep it a little loose. It did feel a little crazy sometimes, sleeping in cars or a barn, but some of those times are the parts of the trip that you remember the most. Leaving room for adventure is important.

Give me a snapshot of your career, what have the last twenty years looked like?
It’s been a wild adventure, to say the least. I mean this whole thing has been something I desired since I was ten years old. I did like the sound of music when I was like, I dunno, thirteen years old. My parents showed up for every single performance. It was like 30 performances of that. They didn’t miss a single one. It’s been so cool bringing my parents to film sets and having them be a part of the journey. It’s a really special time in life.

Also, the fact that I’m getting to act alongside some of my heroes and be a part of movies that I adored growing up, is just beyond words. For example, I’m getting to make Twister right now, which was one of my favorite movies growing up. It’s just so surreal. Or even with Top Gun: Maverick, I almost didn’t do it. But it has changed my life in every way. So it’s hard to imagine what life would be like if I had turned this roll down like I originally did.