Glen Powell’s new sports comedy series, Chad Powers, is out on Tuesday, Sept. 30. It’s based on a 2022 prank that Eli Manning pulled in which he disguised himself as a man named Chad Powers and then tried out as a walk-on quarterback for Penn State. It’s similar to how Ted Lasso came about. Glen plays a disgraced former college quarterback named Russ Holliday who disguises himself as the title character in order to get a second chance. He’s described it as “Mrs. Doubtfire, but with football.”
Glen’s been doing promo for this series and his upcoming movie, The Running Man. He recently stopped by the Therapuss podcast. While he and host Jake Shane were talking about Russ/Chad’s personal growth over the course of the first season, Glen related it to real-life cancel culture. Then he dropped an interesting little blind item about meeting a problematic actor at a Hollywood party and refusing to take a picture with him.
“I showed up to the party and there was somebody that had basically been on the ropes in terms of sort of getting cancelled,” Powell began.
Powell shared that the event was “one of those Hollywood parties where there are cameras and press and all that stuff.”
Without naming the “recently canceled” celebrity, the Top Gun: Maverick star revealed that “this person had made a lot of some of my favorite movies.”
“He came up and he said nice to meet you, and I was like, ‘Oh, dude, big fan.’ And then a photographer said, ‘Hey, can we take a picture of the two of you guys?’ And this person was recently cancelled and was, as of late, not good,” Powell said.
“I was a fan of their work but not a fan of their choices, right? So I was just kind of being nice, but then when they want to take a picture with you, I realized very quickly how I was like I don’t know if this is a good idea. He clearly clocked that I was like ‘this is probably not a good idea,’” the actor said.
“This guy, his face is toxic,” Powell went on to say. “You know, like going out into the world, like people are having a visceral reaction to this person in terms of the bad choices they’ve made.”
He connected the awkward interaction to his character in the upcoming series Chad Powers, a disgraced college football star who returns to the field in disguise and under a new alias. “The character that I play in Chad, it’s like Russ Holiday is a guy that just made a mistake, right? He’s not a bad guy,” Powell said.
He concluded that some reputations, however, are earned. “Some of these other people that get canceled, they should lie where they’re shot,” Powell said.
“Some of these other people that get canceled, they should lie where they’re shot.” I’ve watched that part of the clip five times now, and I can’t figure out if Glen is talking about the person from his story or if he’s saying that the actor in question made bad choices and should be given the opportunity to apologize and work their way back into the public’s good graces in a similar manner as Russ/Chad is trying to do. I feel like that’s a huge clue into figuring out who he’s talking about.
So, thoughts on who this canceled celebrity could be? The biggest guesses online are Kevin Spacey or Armie Hammer. I can see why people are going to Spacey, but he got outed as a terrible person in 2017 and it feels like Glen’s exchange happened more recently. It could be Armie. His own house of cards didn’t really start crumbling until 2021. I think there’s also an outside chance that it was James Franco, or maybe even Jonathan Majors, depending on how recent this party was. This story got me thinking though. It sort of pulls back the curtain that these problematic, toxic actors are still accepted into those spaces as long as their peers aren’t photographed with them.
Here’s the clip of Glen telling the story:
Photos credit: Sadou Faye/Avalon, Faye’s Vision/Cover Images
