Glen Powell and Tom Cruise have become friends since costarring inTop Gun: Maverick. They’re so close, in fact, that there hasn’t been that be-on-your-best-behavior sort of thing for a while.
As Powell told British GQ for a profile published Tuesday, it happened when Cruise flew Powell from reshoots on their blockbuster at a studio outside London back to the city.
“Tom goes ‘oh no, oh no,’ and he starts dropping the helicopter over London,” Powell said. “I was like, ‘Am I about to be the unnamed guy that dies with Tom in a smoking hole in the middle of London?'”
Since Powell and Cruise appeared in the high-profile movie together, Cruise has been a mentor to Powell, the British GQ story noted.
“The one thing I feel we’re kindred spirits in is he’s obsessed with movies. That was our love language on set,” Powell said. “I got to watch a guy who knew every department. He was able to clearly interface with everyone and be so friendly and respectful and be able to communicate that vision.”
Cruise, who starred in the original Top Gun in 1986, produced the sequel.
Powell, the star of Anyone but You and July’sTwisters, said Cruise has told him that, for a movie to be a global success, as many of Cruise’s are, it needs to, as writer Ben Allen puts it, “telegraph universal emotions.”
For example, Powell knows that everyone can relate to weather emergencies.
“You can look at a big disaster movie and go, ‘Oh cool, the world loves disaster movies,'” he said. “No, no. It’s about who we are in the face of disaster, and what the human instinct is in reacting to it. How do you put the audience in the cockpit? How do you put the audience on the ground in the face of a tornado?”
In December 2022, Powell said in an episode of Variety’s Actors on Actors that Cruise helped him through the end of their blockbuster with some odd advice.
Cruise instructed him to “lean into the douchebaggery of it all.”
It obviously worked. Top Gun: Maverick made nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, making it one of the top 15 highest-grossing films of all time.