Anyone but You (Movie)

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    ‘Twisters’ Star Glen Powell Intends to Play the Hollywood Game

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    In a town littered with would-be superstars, he’s trying to beat the odds by giving studios what they crave. It’s no coincidence he’s everywhere.The cookies weren’t selling.It was a blustery day in suburban Austin, Texas, in 1996, and Lauren and Leslie Powell had a sales quota to meet for their Girl Scout troop. But it was that cookie time of year: Thin Mints and Caramel deLites were seemingly up for grabs everywhere.Glen, their 8-year-old brother, suggested a marketing gambit. “He had us make signs that advertised ‘free gift with every purchase,’ and we put them up around the neighborhood,” Leslie recalled.Glen was the gift.“He would hide in some honeysuckle bushes and pop out after a purchase to perform Elvis songs,” she said, laughing. “That’s my big brother. Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”I confess: Until I heard stories like that one — and spent time with the hound dog himself — I didn’t have high hopes for this profile. Glen Powell? I figured he was a dumb jock who coasted into a movie career on his all-American good looks. Boring.Yes, fine, Powell has been having a bona fide Hollywood moment. He stood nude on a cliff top with Sydney Sweeney in “Anyone but You” at Christmas. He is currently starring on Netflix in “Hit Man,” a comedy-drama-thriller-romance. And in July, Powell will be outrunning big-budget tornadoes in “Twisters.”But a superstar in the making?C’mon.I met Powell, 35, for breakfast in April at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. He showed up in a tight blue polo accessorized with a chain necklace and chest hair. (Perhaps he was in character, I snarked to myself, as Good-Looking Frat Guy, a bit part he played in “Stuck in Love,” a 2012 romance.) An omelet was ordered. Tabasco sauce was summoned and squirted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell on How ‘Anyone but You’ Beat the Rom-Com Odds

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      Here are their takeaways after the film, debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.As Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell promoted their romantic comedy, “Anyone but You,” last year, life appeared to be imitating art: The co-stars posed cheek to cheek while sightseeing in Australia. Powell dipped a gleeful Sweeney in his arms. Sweeney cast longing gazes up at Powell on red carpets. The pair flirted and giggled in interviews.When Powell and his long-term girlfriend broke up, and Sweeney remained engaged to her fiancé, Jonathan Davino (an executive producer of “Anyone but You”), rumors of an illicit offscreen relationship between the two actors took hold.The speculation played out, the stars said, exactly as they intended.“The two things that you have to sell a rom-com are fun and chemistry. Sydney and I have a ton of fun together, and we have a ton of effortless chemistry,” Powell said in an interview. “That’s people wanting what’s on the screen off the screen, and sometimes you just have to lean into it a bit — and it worked wonderfully. Sydney is very smart.”Sweeney, who is also an executive producer through her Fifty-Fifty Films company, said she was intimately involved with the marketing strategy on the Columbia Pictures film, including, perhaps, fanning those headline-generating flames.“I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”The R-rated romance follows Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), who share a night that ends badly and are then thrust together at a destination wedding in Australia, where Ben’s friend and Bea’s sister are getting married. The film is based loosely on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and is full of bawdy zingers, grand gestures and sun-dappled scenery.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Anyone but You’ Review: Baring Bums in the Land Down Under

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      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell romp in a rom-com bomb with gratuitous clothes-shedding, played out against beautiful backdrops.The floundering romantic comedy “Anyone but You” has several things going for it: the rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, a luxurious Australian backdrop, and more white teeth and washboard abs than the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The plot is a classic switchback prank. Sworn enemies Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell) pretend to fall in love at a destination wedding so that their friends and family (Alexandra Shipp, Hadley Robinson, Bryan Brown, Michelle Hurd and GaTa) will quit trying to trick them into liking each other. It’s a loose reworking of “Much Ado About Nothing,” and, presumably, the first Shakespeare adaptation where a dog does yoga — and certainly the first in which a man (GaTa) serenades a koala. Nevertheless, the film, directed by Will Gluck, who wrote the screenplay with Ilana Wolpert, is so awkwardly assembled that our attention gets pulled away from the leads to the bizarrely lavish buffet spreads in the background. We’re mildly curious about whether these two fakers will slip between the sheets for real — and majorly interested in why a guest bedroom has so many bowls of fruit.“Anyone but You” is being sold as a return to the salacious rom-com, although that’s only true for one good scene. Overall, it’s more bawdy than erotic. “You know a lot about bathroom law,” Ben purrs to Bea when they meet-cute wheedling a restroom key from a barista. After a whirlwind first date, Bea wakes up in Ben’s arms fully clothed. The night appears to have been innocent — at least, that’s the implication from Gluck’s close-up shot of Bea’s cinched belt buckle — but both panic and settle into a shtick of exchanging public insults with the spite of jilted lovers.We can barely make out whether a month has elapsed since that encounter or several years. Just resign yourself to nonsense, like the entrance of Margaret (Charlee Fraser), Ben’s ex, with her new boyfriend, Beau (Joe Davidson), a galumphing surfer who promptly attempts to eat a bundle of ceremonial sage. The running time is all flimsy bikinis and flimsier excuses to get people undressed. A tarantula? Strip off those shorts! Itchy sand? Swim trunks begone! A fire? Snuff out the flames with a dress! By the time Bea tumbles into Sydney Harbor, it’s a shock that Ben leaps in after her without tearing away his pants.Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle. Here, their performances get bullied around by the insistent pop soundtrack. One genuinely tender scene involves Bea crooning a peppy Top 40 hit to steady Ben’s nerves. But she only gets in a few quiet a cappella bars before Gluck cranks the original at an earsplitting volume — are you not entertained!? — and, for good measure, blares it again at the end over some riotous behind-the-scenes karaoke. You wonder if he spent more time on the closing credits than the actual film.Anyone but YouRated R for nudity and brash language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More