‘Everybody Wants Some’: Meet Breakout Star Glen Powell
Maybe you knew a guy like Finnegan in high school or college: smart, charming, funny and irritatingly good at everything from nabbing pop flys on the baseball diamond to picking up young women at a night club. He’s a jock, for sure, but not the kind of bro that turned house parties into an instant toxic dump of XY-chromosome douchery. He could get away with faux-worldly affectations like a pipe or quoting Kerouac at keggers. Even among alpha males, this guy was admired as a cut above the rest. If you’re a filmmaker like Richard Linklater, you remember this character from your younger, wilder days and you put him in a movie like Everybody Wants Some!!, his free-form, loosey-goosey look back at his experience as a collegiate baseball player. And if you’re as lucky as the writer-director, you get a guy like Glen Powell to play him.
“Rick kept saying this character was the hardest one to cast,” the 27-year-old actor says via phone from Arizona, where he and his costars are killing time before a screening. “Finnegan can seem self-righteous and come off like an asshole; people have to listen to him talk a lot and they’re going to get sick of hearing his voice. The key to him was … everybody looks back on their past with a certain type of nostalgia. Most folks go, ‘Oh, I was the best player on the team, I dated everyone, I was great!’ Rick has no sentimentality for that; he’s the kind of guy that would say, Well, that just wasn’t the case. The guy has an incredible memory — we called him ‘Rickapedia.’
“Most people are just bullshitting,” Powell continues. “So Rick said, play him like the person everybody says they were in college. The bullshit version of their story? Make him that guy!”
Though Everybody Wants Some!! is most assuredly an ensemble movie, and Finnegan is only one of several older ballplayers who take the rookie pitcher Jake (Glee‘s Blake Jenner) under their wing. But he’s undeniably the film MVP: the charismatic smooth-talker with the shit-eating grin and the infectious let’s-go-have-some-fun attitude. Linklater referred to this long-in-the-works comedy as a “spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused” — and Powell is the movie’s Matthew McConaughey, the sort of scene-stealing performer that leaves filmgoers shaking their heads and saying, who was that guy?
A native of Austin, Texas, he started as a child actor, racking up credits in movies like Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and The Great Debaters. As a kid, he gravitated more toward football and lacrosse (his uncles were MMA trainers, so he also “learned how to fight competitively early”), although it was a particularly fateful baseball game that endeared him to his future Everybody director. “When I was 16, I’d been cast in Fast Food Nation,” he says, referring to Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s polemic on food production. “And while I was playing in a charity baseball game, I ended up breaking my arm about a week before filming was starting. I had to call him: ‘Um, Rick, I broke my arm … can you please not fire me?” I was waiting to get the axe. Then he said, ‘Wait, do you have cast? There was always a guy in high school that had a cast, you gotta keep it! It’ll be great.'”