Interview by Elisa Leonelli
In the comedy series Chad Powers (Hulu) charming Texas actor Glen Powell plays a football quarterback, Russ Holliday of the Oregon Ducks, who eight years earlier had made a series of unforgivable mistakes at the end of a game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and could no longer play on any team.
Eventually he decides to present himself with face prosthetics and a wig in order to be unrecognizable and gets hired by another team of college football, the Catfish of Georgia.
The idea came from an episode that actually happened, when in 2022 the famous quarterback Eli Manning of the New York Giants, now retired from the sport, during his television program Eli’s Place, showed up with a fake nose and a wig under the name of Chad Powers at Penn State’s football tryouts.
The series is produced by the Omaha production company of Eli’s older brother, Peyton Manning, who is also a famous football player.
We interviewed Glen Powell in Los Angeles.
Glenn Powell as Russ Holliday (c) 2025 Disney
How did you learn to play the game of football to such an extent to seem credible as a champion of the sport?
“I am a hard worker and I was willing to put in the time to pretend that I was at least proficient on the field and to convince viewers. But my good fortune was that we had as co-producers Eli and Peyton, the two best quarterbacks of all time, who made sure every night after watching the dailies that I made the right moves, they studied every detail, made clever remarks, told me what I did wrong. And then they surrounded me with real players, because they wanted the sequences of the football games to be absolutely authentic, the uniforms, the teams and the stadiums were all realistic, even in the context of a crazy comedy with a ridiculous premise.”
Many of us would like to have a second chance to succeed in life after making a big mistake. Is this theme explored in Chad Powers particularly close to your heart?
“Yes, because it happens a lot in my profession, and not just to me. I have many friends who have had a promising start, but then are not offered other opportunities. It’s very hard to get people to believe in you, so my philosophy is to pick up the phone and try to create opportunities for myself. Trust in the possibility of redemption is a universal emotion for us human beings. No one has lived a perfect existence, we have all made mistakes, and if we could we would like to turn back the clock, and right all the wrongs.”
Glenn Powell as Chad Powers (c) 2025 Disney
In the TV series we see that the idea of camouflage comes to Russ when he sees a poster for Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) with Robin Williams dressed as a woman. Did that movie inspire you, when you decided to co-produce the series and also co-write the scripts?
“Yes, I was inspired by that movie and also by Tootsie (1982), one of my favorite films, where the idea was that Dustin Hoffman, this misogynist guy who didn’t know how to navigate the world properly, puts on a dress and a mask and becomes a woman. Only then does he really start understanding women and respecting them. So I’ve always liked the idea that masking teaches you things. It was native to the premise that this player, who had never been a good teammate, ends up becoming one when from Russ he turns into Chad. That was the mathematical key to building the character.”
It was not the first time you transformed your appearance with wigs and disguises. You had already done it last year in Hit Man by Richard Linklater. Would you enjoy doing it in life as well to avoid being only seen as a good-looking man, since you became so famous after Top Gun: Maverick with Tom Cruise?
“I’ve only recently realized how privileged I am at this point in my career to be working on movie sets with incredible filmmakers like Edgar Wright (The Running Man) and J.J. Abrams (Ghostwriter). But I noticed that now, when I go out in public, there are a lot more camera phones that are filming me, and I had to get used to it. Sometimes, while I was trying on wigs and fake teeth in the lab of legendary make-up artist Vincent Van Dyke in North Hollywood, I would keep them on when I went down the street for coffee or something to eat, to see what effect they had on people. But as actors we should never take ourselves too seriously, forget that our job is to play at dress-up and pretend to be someone else.
What observations does the Chad Powers series make about how you should behave if you are ostracized by cancel culture?
We’ve seen what often happens when an embarrassing incident is repeated endlessly on social media until it define who you are, represents you and becomes your identity. When you go out into the world and people constantly force you to remember the worst moment in your life, you start to feel like a failure. It was fun for us to explore how Russ Holliday, who had a nervous breakdown on the biggest stage in the world (the college football championship final), that had destroyed his career, instead of accepting his responsibility, admitting he was wrong and apologizing, he misbehaves, becoming a conspiracy theorist, investing in cryptocurrency, etc. Eventually, he decides to come up with another name and a new face, a false identity, to be able to play football again, go back to the glory times of the past, and finally get the ball to the goal line without letting it fall out of his hands. But this is immature behavior, and we see it change over the course of the six episodes.
To conclude, I feel obliged to mention a scene in Chad Powers that the dubbing in Italian perhaps will not be able to translate, when it’s suggested that he is suffering from C.T.E. (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), si-ti-i is the pronunciation of the acronym in English. This is a big problem explored in Concussion (2015) with Will Smith, and addressed recently in the New York Times, when it was revealed that the killer Shane Tamura was suffering from C.T.E. at age 27. The frequent blows to the head suffered during this violent sport, which many American boys begin playing in school from the age of 12, cause this disease that cannot be diagnosed until after death with a brain autopsy.
Luckily girls are not allowed to play American football…
Published in Italian on Best Movie, Italy