Glen Powell Is in Over His Head and Falling Head Over Heels in ‘Hit Man’ Trailer
Glen Powell‘s on-screen characters have been doing a fair amount of pretending recently. The actor recently starred alongside Sydney Sweeney in the box-office hit Anyone But You, deploying the classic fake-dating trope to make rom-com gold. In the first trailer for Richard Linklaster’s Hit Man, Powell is still playing pretend, except this time, he’s a professor parading around as a professional killer.
Powell’s Gary Johnson isn’t just in over his head as he attempts to keep up the charade of being a hitman helping the New Orleans Police Department catch people hoping to keep the blood off their own hands — he’s also head over heels for his client, a woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who is fleeing an abusive relationship.
“Am I the right guy to eliminate your problem?” he asks her. The likely answer is probably not, but they’ll figure it out together when the film arrives on Netflix on June 7.
Hit Man is loosely based on a Texas Monthly article about a tech nerd helping police record undercover sting operations. Powell and Linklater, who last worked together on Everybody Wants Some!!, co-wrote the film, which escalates into a tangled web of deception and mystery with existentialist comedy at its core and some romance thrown in there, too.
“This was a Covid baby of ours, and it wasn’t like we set out to make a movie. But any conversation with Richard Linklater is going to lead to something profound, I’ve found,” Powell told Rolling Stone last month. “I sent him an article from Texas Monthly about this guy who works for the New Orleans Police Department as basically an actor setting up people on sting operations in murder-for-hire cases. Rick and I were talking about it, and we found an element of it that we thought was worth exploring. It became a really great character piece and an exploration of identity and passion, and it just became really fun. And this movie, it’s like his brain and my brain completely melded together. I think it utilizes what makes him special as a director to its fullest. So I really am excited for people to see it. It’s awesome.”
Hit Man also features appearances from Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Molly Bernard, and Evan Holtzman.
“I think that’s an attribute of the movie — it’s about a lot of things,” Linklater told Netflix’s Tudum. “It’s about identity and self and passion. But on a plot level, it’s just a guy who gets in a little too deep. His passions lead him in a direction where he’s deceiving someone he’s in love with, and being someone else. They have to deal with those repercussions.”