Tom Cruise's Power in Hollywood Had a Significant Impact on This Rising Star's Bank Account
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Tom Cruise has been famous for over four decades after his 1983 breakout role in Risky Business at the age of 20. He’s been at the top of the Hollywood game ever since, and with that success comes an enormous amount of power. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the 61-year-old actor decided to postpone the release of Top Gun: Maverick until crowds were ready to come back to the theaters. That was the right choice for Cruise and the film, but it came at a significant cost to a rising actor.
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Glen Powell, who played Hangman in the film, revealed to The Hollywood Reporter just how much that move cost his bank account. “I’d never made any significant amount of money on a movie, including Top Gun, and I was depleting a bank account to a point where my accountant was like, ‘This pandemic cannot last much longer,’” he explained. “But Tom was already Tom; I was waiting for my life to change.” Powell has a sharp vision of creating the career of his dreams, but his finances weren’t where they needed to be during a global shutdown of the entertainment industry.
Powell considers Cruise to be his mentor, and shared with him, “I’m working to try to be you.” The 35-year-old actor may have some catching up to do because the Mission Impossible star has always had his eyes on the prize, according to Rob Lowe’s 2011 memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography. He wrote about his Outsiders co-star, “He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before.” Cruise was “already showing traits that will make him famous; he’s zeroed in like a laser,” he knew what it took to be an A-lister in Hollywood.
Cruise’s decision to delay the release of Top Gun: Maverick proved that his instincts were right — audiences had a thirst for the franchise, and they wanted to see it on the big screen. It’s why Variety writer Owen Gleibergman praised the actor in Los Angeles Magazine for being the “most complete movie star” of our time. “He’s the only one left who fulfills every definition, stretching back to the days of the studio system, of what a movie star is — an actor whose very presence transforms a movie into an event,” he said. “Cruise, obviously, has had his ups and downs, but he has worked tirelessly for 40 years to make himself into the living embodiment of that larger-than-life old-school Hollywood force.”
Despite Cruise’s Scientology controversies, which is another hot topic for another day, Powell did have to surrender to the wishes of one big movie star. His bank account balance probably hoped that Top Gun: Maverick had an earlier streaming release during the pandemic, but the two-year wait paid off handsomely for both of them.
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