Master of disguise: Glen Powell breaks down his many “Hit Man” personas

“A lot of this movie is really about the way we label ourselves, and the way we see ourselves moving through the world,” the star tells Entertainment Weekly.

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In 2024, Glen Powell is a man of many faces. Anyone But You, his smash hit rom-com with Sydney Sweeney, technically hit theaters at the end of 2023, but its success defined the box office for the first few months of this year. There’s more where that came from, too. In addition to starring in Twisters, Powell is also the co-writer and star of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which is coming soon to Netflix. As Gary Johnson, a police IT worker who finds himself thrust into duty as an undercover sting operative pretending to be a hired assassin, Powell pulls off many different looks.

When we first meet Gary, he’s dressed as functionally as possible. The glasses, khakis, and button-down shirts are perfectly acceptable for his work as an adjunct philosophy professor and tech hobbyist, but certainly don’t make him stick out in a crowd. Only when Gary begins working undercover does he really start to think about the way he looks.

“A lot of this movie is really about the way we label ourselves, and the way we see ourselves moving through the world,” Powell tells Entertainment Weekly. “Gary is a man who’s moving through the world without an identity, so to speak. He just is attracted to what he is attracted to. He loves ornithology, he loves audio A/V equipment. He’s fascinated by a lot, but passionate about little. He doesn't put any thought into the presentational part of his life, except when he is in these sting operations.”

Adapted from a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth, Hit Man is about Gary weaponizing people’s fantasies of professional assassins against them. No such people exist in real life (as Linklater previously explained to EW), but they’re all over movies and TV shows, so many would-be criminals think it’s very easy to call up a killer and get rid of the person bothering them. Gary helps the local police department catch these folks in the act, but that requires convincing the sting targets that he is really a killer. In order to do so, he has to understand what they want and play into that fantasy.

Sometimes that means dressing like the polar opposite of the person he’s tricking. Other times, as with one character who wants to have their meeting while skeet shooting, it means looking just like them.

“When you look at a lot of these people that are trying to kill someone, they are inherent narcissists,” Powell says. “So for this numb-nut in the swamp, he's really looking for someone like himself. He wants a friend, he wants a co-conspirator. That’s how you do it with a guy like that. These fantasies operate on all kinds of different aspects.”

One of the unexpected treats of Hit Man, especially if you go in expecting a professional assassin movie in the vein of Michael Mann’s Collateral or David Fincher’s The Killer, are all the scenes of Gary applying his own wigs and makeup before a sting. For a guy who starts the movie with such a beige and banal appearance, Gary soon makes you think he could be a decent contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

“They got weirder and weirder,” Linklater says of Gary’s disguises. “Glen would need an extra couple hours of hair and makeup while we were setting up. It was the only time we were waiting. And Glen would get out of the van or something, we would see him and the whole crew would just go, ‘What the f---?! Is that Glen?’”

After a good run of successful stings, Gary eventually runs into someone who surprises him instead of the other way around. Enter Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants an assassin to free her from her abusive husband. Dressed all in black like Johnny Cash and calling himself “Ron,” Gary turns himself into what he assumes must be Madison’s fantasy of an impossibly cool killer. Unlike the other disguises, Ron starts to stick — probably because, at a subconscious level, he represents what Gary wants for himself as well. "Less of a thinker, more of a doer," Powell says.

“The architecture of the movie is Adria projecting an identity onto Ron and Gary projecting this identity of Ron onto her,” Powell elaborates. “So it's two people sitting down at a table completely lying to each other, which we love because that’s the essence of a first date. The fun part about this dance, as Rick and I always conceived it, is here’s a guy who’s building out fantasies for all sorts of people, but Ron is the first time he’s really building a fantasy for who he wishes he could be. This is an identity he wants to get stuck in, and that’s the joy of this movie.”

Hit Man, in other words, is a movie about acting. Gary puts on different outfits and plays various characters, just like Powell does. But this isn’t just the type of acting that professionals do, it’s also about the personas that we all construct — when we post online, when we go on dates, when we present ourselves to the world. And Powell isn’t the only Hit Man star who gets to play that. As Madison and “Ron” forge a connection, she starts changing her look too.

“The first time we meet her, she has straight hair, she's all poised and talks slowly,” Arjona says in a joint Zoom interview with EW. “Then you meet her again and she has this wild hair and this sexual energy — God knows where I pulled that one out of.”

“Probably from working with me,” Powell quips.

“Yeah, it was a mirroring effect,” Arjona says sarcastically. Turning serious again, she continues, “The only difference between Ron and Madison is that he knows he's playing a character and he turns it on. But Madison really believes in this new person that she is becoming, or rather creating for herself, to escape her past.”

For Powell, Hit Man represents a full-circle moment. One of his first professional acting roles was a small part in Linklater’s 2006 mockumentary Fast Food Nation. Almost two full decades later, they’re donning a completely different look these days: co-writers and collaborators.

"As a young kid in Austin who was obsessed with movies, I could look at a guy like Richard Linklater and be like, ‘Oh, this is a Texas boy who is doing it at the highest level and making films that people around the world are resonating with. That makes me feel like it can be done!'" Powell says. "So I get to have this moment right now with Rick where we are fully partners in this thing."

Powell is driving through the city when he says this over the phone, passing by the space where he rehearsed as a 10-year-old for The Music Man and the spot where he auditioned for "a crappy toilet commercial." To think he's now co-writing with Linklater feels surreal. “That’s where this all started: the joy of performing," he says.

Hit Man will play in select theaters starting May 24 before hitting Netflix on June 7.

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