Next month, Stephen King’s The Running Man will see its second film adaptation, this time starring Glen Powell as the titular man running for his life. It will be one of Powell’s biggest roles to date, as he’s the solo lead of a big-screen action movie. So, when he needed advice on how to handle it all, he turned to a friend who knows a thing or two about being an action movie star, Tom Cruise.
In a profile for EW, Glen Powell says that he spent two and a half hours on a phone call with his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Tom Cruise so he could pick his brain on just how to make a movie like The Running Man. Like Cruise, Powell performed many of his own stunts, and his main question was a simple one. He asked…
What is your advice on not only how to make these things look authentic for an audience, but how to survive a movie?
It’s a fairly simple, but also fairly important question. If you’re going to do the stunts, you need to make them look good, but you don’t want to sacrifice your own health and well-being in the process. And Tom Cruise, who has injured himself doing stunts before, certainly understands this keenly.
On the topic of surviving the movie, Cruise’s main advice was to respect the potential danger of the stunt that you’re doing. The Mission: Impossible star may be seen as somebody willing to risk life and limb because of all the wild stunts he does, but Cruise clearly takes preparation seriously, and he impressed the importance of that on Powell. The actor continued…
It was made very clear after talking to him that there was a real sense of discipline around these things and to treat these stunts with reverence, because you can get extremely hurt, and he knows it better than anyone. He’s broken every bone in his body. He’s like, ‘This is not messing around.’
Watching Tom Cruise do crazy stunts on screen has become one of the reasons that people go to see Tom Cruise in movies. As it turns out, he very much realizes this and embraces it. According to Glen Powell, his Top Gun: Maverick co-star takes his responsibility to the audience very seriously and knows that it’s important that he be there on screen doing all the action because it’s what he feels he owes the audience. Powell explained…
To do all those things is really, really crucial to sell what you need to sell in a movie, and to justify people’s ticket prices. If they’re following you, they want to know that that’s the commitment — if I want you to show up for me, I’ve got to show up for you.
Glen Powell’s star is certainly on the rise. While he may not be as big as Tom Cruise, he’s learning how to be a movie star from one of the best.
The trailer for The Running Man includes moments that show Glen Powell’s character jumping off bridges and, as Tom Cruise himself once did, hanging off the side of a building. It should make for some great action that is hopefully worth the ticket price.