IT HAS BECOME TRITE TO COMPARE FRIENDLY, HAPPY MEN TO GOLDEN RETRIEVERS, BUT ACTOR GLEN POWELL’S RETRIEVERDOM IS CLINICAL.
This man cannot help but look warmly, excitedly, and adoringly at whoever is near. Onscreen, such as when he played Hangman in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, the role that brought his career from a simmering breakout to a boil, he can be a dick. Offscreen, he is hopeless.
While Powell was in Australia this past spring filming Anyone but You—a romantic comedy that he will not discuss when we meet in September, out of solidarity with the actors’ strike—he joined his costars in taking in the sights. He got caught in the rain. He rode atop a double-decker bus. He went to the zoo and fed a giraffe a carrot. In every photo, Powell had a wide grin on his face, like a kid on a roller coaster—this, he tells me, is called “the Powell face,” and his whole family is prone to it. In shots with his costar Sydney Sweeney from their Australia interlude, along with one well-documented appearance at CinemaCon in April, he looked overjoyed—he looked, many thought, very much in love. These photos were coupled with news of Powell’s split from model and designer Gigi Paris; specious reports from the of strife between Sweeney and her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (who in spite of being “photographed carrying a bag and a dog bed out of their shared L. A. home” is still engaged to Sweeney); and an Instagram post from Paris, who had evidently unfollowed both Powell and Sweeney, captioned “know your worth & onto the next.” Suddenly everyone was certain that Powell and Sweeney were having a passionate affair, chaperoned by an Australian giraffe. The evidence was in their .
