When Glen Powell embarrassed himself in front of Denzel Washington: “I misinterpreted that”
It might feel like Glen Powell has come out of nowhere to suddenly be anointed as the next big thing in Hollywood, but the actor has been working solidly for over 20 years, and he collaborated with some of the most famous names in the business long before he was a star.
After landing his mainstream breakthrough in Top Gun: Maverick, the industry has decided that Powell is the newest A-lister on the block, and Tinseltown apparently isn’t interested in taking any further questions on the matter. He’s the guy whether anybody likes it or not, but it’s not like he hasn’t put in the hard yards.
Powell made his screen debut under Robert Rodriguez’s direction in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. His second feature-length appearance came alongside a star-studded cast of comedy heavyweights in Luke Wilson’s The Wendell Baker Story. His third was Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, and his fourth was The Great Debaters, which starred and was directed by Denzel Washington.
That’s an impressive introduction to cinema in terms of name value alone, but Powell completely misread the room when he auditioned for the latter. Part of it can be attributed to the naivety of youth, with the actor only 17 years old when his mother drove him from Texas to Louisiana to read for the part of Preston Whittington.
It would have been daunting enough for a teenager to recite lines in front of a two-time Academy Award-winning icon like Washington, but Powell’s nerves were only increased when he discovered that producer, multimedia mogul, and certified billionaire Oprah Winfrey was also present.
“I got a call from him right afterwards saying, ‘Hey, I really want you for this bigger role; some of the other producers don’t think you can pull it off. So I’m going to invite you to the table read, and I just need you to come ready to play,'” Powell recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. They were words of advice and encouragement, but the rookie took things a little too literally.
Deciding that “ready to play” carried sartorial undertones, he opted to turn up to the table and read with Washington and Winfrey wearing a full tuxedo. “I kind of misinterpreted that,” he admitted, not that it prevented him from getting the part in the megastar’s second directorial effort.
For whatever reason, Washington’s insistence that Powell prove the doubters wrong by bringing his A-game to the table read convinced him that the best way to go about it was by wearing a tux. The embarrassment must have been palpable on his part, even if everybody else would have been completely bemused that a 17-year-old kid had opted to audition for a college drama set in the 1930s by dressing like they were going to a high school dance.
