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      Richard Linklater on ‘Hit Man’ and the Killer Inside Us All

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      Richard Linklater’s latest movie, “Hit Man,” is a bit of a departure for the director, who has made some of the most acclaimed and influential indie films of the last 30-plus years. The movie, which stars the ascendant Glen Powell, is about a mild-mannered college professor who has a side gig with the New Orleans Police Department, setting up stings by posing as different hit men. It’s a tight, stylish and sexy thriller, with some twisted romance added in, from a filmmaker better known for the ambling rhythms and gently existential tone of beloved classics like “Dazed and Confused,” “Boyhood” and “Before Sunrise” (not to mention his great comedy “School of Rock,” which exists in a category of its own).Listen to the Conversation With Richard LinklaterDavid Marchese talks to the acclaimed director about his new film “Hit Man” and life’s big questions.But alongside its pop charms, “Hit Man” still manages to sneak in a provocative exploration of one of Linklater’s pet themes: the nature and malleability of personal identity. It’s also, as so many of the 63-year-old’s films are, a movie that understands the pure cinematic pleasure of watching smart, inquisitive people converse — exploring ideas and philosophies, making one another laugh, testing one another.It’s the talking that made me fall in love with Linklater’s films, which he almost always writes or co-writes. (He co-wrote “Hit Man” with Powell.) The way his vivid, relatable characters discuss the big questions, with so much soul and hang-looseness, free from any highfalutin airs, has long been something of a north star for me as a movie lover and as a talker. The searching, openhearted discussions in Linklater films are the kind of conversations most meaningful to me in my own life and work. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, but I can see a pretty clear line from adolescent me sitting around watching all the chatty oddballs in “Waking Life” and “Slacker” to middle-aged me, here and now, speaking with Richard Linklater — who, surprise surprise, sounds a lot like a character from one of his movies.I’m curious how you think about your identity at 63 years old. Do you feel as if it’s fixed? Do you still have formative experiences? It’s the kind of thing I’ve thought a lot about my entire life: What could transform me? I was probably more in the camp of we’re fixed, give or take whatever little percentage around the edges. So I was interested in this notion lately that, oh, you can change, the personality isn’t fixed. That seems current: this notion of self and identity, gender. I sort of like that it’s all on the table, that everybody’s thinking you kind of are who you say you are. To me, that’s interesting.Do you have a lot of different identities? Probably as many as anybody else.What are the different ones? Well, if you get me on a Ping-Pong table — my third rail is athletics. I feel this little rush of competitiveness, which I really don’t have in the world of art at all — or my life even. I’m the guy looking at the world through glass. I was always the guy in the corner thinking about everything. I’m an introvert who gets put in extroverted situations occasionally, and I can play that role. But roles I currently play? I don’t know. It’s nice to care less about it as you get older. More

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      ‘Hit Man’ Review: It’s a Hit, Man

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      Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.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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      Glen Powell at the Sundance Film Festival

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      The star and co-writer of “Hit Man” heard that his film had wowed audiences, but because of the actors’ strike, he couldn’t see for himself until now.Glen Powell doesn’t want for much these days, after co-starring in “Top Gun: Maverick” and watching his new film, the romantic comedy “Anyone but You,” cross $100 million at the worldwide box office. Still, for the past few months, there was one little thing he felt he had missed out on.It has to do with “Hit Man,” a comedy Powell co-wrote with the director Richard Linklater that casts him as a hapless teacher who must pose as an assassin for hire. I first saw it at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it proved so crowd-pleasing that the audience broke into applause midway through the movie. A week later at the Toronto International Film Festival, the response was also through the roof.But for months, Powell had only heard about all that secondhand. Since the Screen Actors Guild strike was still going strong during the fall tests, Powell wasn’t able to attend a premiere of “Hit Man” until it played Monday night at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterward, he called me from a car that was speeding him toward celebratory drinks.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?  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

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      At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

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      This year’s lineup includes films from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Bradley Cooper in which female characters squirm under the thumbs of egocentric men.The press room at the Venice Film Festival has to be the most beautiful film festival press room in the world. Taking over the third floor of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the main atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height space carpeted in soft cream, with columns clad in marble extending up past Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving way to a sparkling blue sea. On a clear day — which it almost always is — you imagine that, were it not for the curvature of the earth, you could see forever. Or at least to Croatia.It is an eternal contradiction that this lofty space should be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings against the bars of a particularly gilded cage. Or maybe such dark thoughts in a such a light-filled structure — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a festival lineup that, this year, features a profusion of stories about women similarly chafing against the restrictive, but often luxurious, enclosures built by controlling men.Some of these men were towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns in the standout performance in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” as the long-suffering wife of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does much the same as Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In both these cases — and arguably to the detriment of both well-made but strangely evanescent films — the portrayal of genius pales in comparison to the portrait of a woman who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her. in “Ferrari,” Penélope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari, the wife of the Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari.Lorenzo SistiOf two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” only one — Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The other is a lacerating domestic argument in the couple’s bedroom, during which, in every shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a bright, ambitious woman whose devotion to and indulgence of her famous spouse has cost her so much of herself.The life-draining capacity of egocentric men is even more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” in which the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate history, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his death to evade justice. And Pinochet’s wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, or even his better, in sheer perversity; much of the misery the terrorized nation experienced under the dictator is suggested to have been at her behest.But although that gives Lucía, who constantly petitions her husband to bite her so that she too can live out her depravities forever, a degree of apparent agency, that is robbed from her in one brief scene where “The Count,” as he likes to be called, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, including fantasy play that involves her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessed with the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of the film’s most provocatively gruesome early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)Marie Antoinette is perhaps the ultimate emblem of decorative married womanhood. And of course, she was the title star of a previous film from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is yet another tale of a woman’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the influence of a dominant man.Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as Elvis and Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla.”Philippe Le SourdBased on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the film follows the famous couple’s relationship, from their first meeting when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was just 14 years old and living on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the moment, almost a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove through the gates of Graceland for the last time as the house’s mistress.This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola movie, in its luxuriant feel for fabrics and facades, but as in “Marie Antoinette,” here the surfaces become the substance. It is a story about how, especially to a naïve teenager, the trappings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle can be sprung upon you like a trap.During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner film investigating the icky desire on the part of some men to keep their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The biggest hit of Venice so far, it is deeply — if twistedly, and often hilariously — concerned with the idea of female emancipation, as Bella, played by a riveting, inventive and highly physical Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) and then of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).Even the film’s hyperreal aesthetic, in which Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid computer generated skies and seas, reinforce the concept: The film’s self-consciously airless and artificial universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in sex and self-discovery all the more striking.In “Poor Things,” Emma Stone plays Bella, a woman trying to unburden herself from both her adoptive father and her vain lover.Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesThere are still more women trapped under the thumbs of domineering men dotted throughout the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that both feature contract killers (another feature of Venice 2023, if you also take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into further account).Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap up to major-league stardom on the back of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a fake hit man, finds love getting in the way of his mission when an abused wife, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his services. She is driven to it as a means to escape. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is far less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and again, a loss of control, as the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his young, vivacious wife (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to form for Allen, even if one suspects that some of its breeziness is down to the attractive cast compensating for the staleness of Allen’s recent English-language quippery by mercifully speaking in French. (Native French speakers of my acquaintance tell me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds similarly unnatural.)But it does feel more current than most of Allen’s recent output, not least in how it syncs up neatly with this Venice edition’s chief preoccupations: hit men and trapped women, and all the poor things who find themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris apartments, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon hotels, surrounded by luxury, but longing to be free. More

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      ‘Devotion’ Review: An Airman in Reflection

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      Jonathan Majors stars as the U.S. Navy’s first Black aviator in this drama from J.D. Dillard.“Devotion,” directed by J.D. Dillard, recounts the landmark career of Ensign Jesse L. Brown, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who became the U.S. Navy’s first Black aviator in 1948, and, two years later, its first Black officer to die in the Korean War. Brown’s wingman, a wealthy white United States Naval Academy graduate named Thomas J. Hudner Jr., risked his own life in an attempt to save Brown, and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.Their story could be simplified into a sentimental tale of colorblind brotherhood. (Adam Makos’s 2015 nonfiction book of the same name cites a 1951 Ebony magazine as guilelessly cheering, “The key to Jesse’s popularity was his assumption that no race problem existed and, as a result, none did.”) Instead, Dillard and the screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan A.H. Stewart dig deeper into Brown’s pat quotes to the press, revealing a man who didn’t share his anguish with outsiders — a reticence their Brown, played at a lidded simmer by Jonathan Majors, seems to feel toward the very movie he’s in.The goal is to scrub the symbolism off Brown and restore him to humanity: a 24-year-old striver, husband and father who loathes being singled out as a special case. His odd couple dynamic with the easy-grinning Hudner (Glen Powell) is the steadiest narrative thrust in a film that tends to drift from one set piece to another, much like the military itself in this sliver of years between the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War era. Here, Brown and Hudner’s squad might be stationed in the Mediterranean to scare off Soviet ships and wake up from an evening spent in Cannes flirting with a teenage Elizabeth Taylor — a true story, modestly embellished — to learn they’re abruptly pivoting to snowy Sinuiju.Dillard’s curiosity about this often-overlooked time of transition adds some shading to stretches that otherwise feel like a “Top Gun” prequel with the sleek jets swapped out for ungainly gull-wing Corsair propeller planes, heavy beasts that resemble a rockhopper penguin slumped over at the end of a saloon. Dillard and the cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt, allow a scene or two of crowd-pleasing spectacle, say a dogfight with an enemy MIG, or a shot of ocean surf reflected in the steel belly of a skimming aircraft. But despite its emotional score, the film is more interested in unheroic details: insults ignored, insignia easily discarded, platitudes that dissipate in the air. It refuses to build to the kind of operatic weepie Brown himself wouldn’t respect. As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, “Devotion” is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.Still, Majors — one of our most sincere actors — does sob early and often, particularly in a searing moment in front of a mirror when he stares directly at the lens and spits racist insults at his own reflection as though inuring himself to poison. This choice to keep his pain private becomes a window into how Brown wanted to be viewed in life and death: not as a victim in need of rescue, but as his own man.DevotionRated PG-13 for strong language, smoking and scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Meet the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast

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      From trying not to vomit in flight to oiling up for a beach scene, the actors playing pilots got a crash course in the Tom Cruise school of action filmmaking.Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar took to the skies in “Top Gun,” a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters are suiting up in “Top Gun: Maverick.”This time, the aviators are recent graduates of the Navy’s elite fighter school, a.k.a. Top Gun, and they’re tasked with a near-impossible mission overseen by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the brash pilot played by Tom Cruise. Flying alongside Rooster, the son of the original film’s ill-fated Goose, are Hangman, Phoenix, Bob, Coyote, Fanboy and Payback, who must help destroy a foreign enemy’s uranium plant and get out alive. (Though the characters all have actual names, they’re introduced by their aviator call signs, and that’s how they’re known.)The intensive tutelage began offscreen: Cruise monitored the actors’ progress during a grueling five-month training program that culminated in the cast shooting their own action sequences from the back of real F/A-18 jets flown by Navy fighter pilots.Here’s a peek at the new generation of actors behind the call signs.Glen PowellThe actor initially auditioned for the role that went to Miles Teller.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 33“Maverick” role: HangmanWhere you’ve seen him before: “Set It Up,” “Hidden Figures,” “Scream Queens”‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Tom Cruise: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry is betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters.A New Class: Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar, a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters have suited up for the sequel.Filming Challenges: The aerial feats on show in “Top Gun: Maverick” look like the result of digital wizardry. They aren’t.Powell originally auditioned to play Rooster (then called Rascal) but lost out to Miles Teller. Then, when Powell was offered the role that would become Hangman, he turned it down for fear it would be a copy-and-paste take on Val Kilmer’s antagonistic Iceman in the 1986 film. Cruise persuaded Powell to sign on, and they worked together to make the character distinctly Powell’s own. Still, the cocky, confrontational pilot shares more than a few traits with Iceman — as does Powell with Kilmer. When Powell moved out of the San Diego hotel where he had stayed during filming, he bumped into Kilmer, who had just arrived to shoot his scene. “The last things that I moved out of my room were protein powder, weights and tequila,” Powell said. “I’m literally wheeling them on a luggage cart into the elevator, and as the doors are about to close, Val steps in. He looks at me. Then he looks at the luggage cart. And he just started dying laughing. He’s like, ‘This is ‘Top Gun’ right here.’”Monica BarbaroThough the actress could change her character’s call sign, she had good reason to stick with it.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 32“Maverick” role: PhoenixWhere you’ve seen her before: “The Good Cop,” “Chicago Justice,” “UnREAL”The military did not allow women to fly in combat until 1993, and in the first “Top Gun,” all of the Navy fighter pilot characters were men. Barbaro’s role in the sequel is a reflection of the service’s inclusive shift, and her filmed flights were all handled by female Navy fighter pilots. “When I found out I got the part, I was like, ‘Mom, I got it! And guess what? I get to play a pilot. I’m not a love interest!’” the Northern California native said. “We used the women that we got to fly with as role models for how we designed the character.” And while the actors were allowed to change their characters’ call signs, it quickly became clear during the cast’s downtime together that “Phoenix” was a good fit for Barbaro: “Let’s just say, we had one pretty wild night, and the next morning they were surprised that I arose from the ashes.”Greg Tarzan DavisHe was a schoolteacher not long before turning to acting.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 28“Maverick” role: CoyoteWhere you’ve seen him before: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Good Trouble,” “Chicago P.D.”Not long before landing “Maverick,” Davis was an elementary schoolteacher in his home state of Louisiana. “I’m a big believer in following your dreams. I would preach that to my students,” Davis said. “But I realized I wasn’t doing that — because my dream was to be an actor. So I decided to give it a shot.” In a role reversal, Davis, who has gone by Tarzan since his own “wild” youth, said he felt like a kid throughout production, enthralled by the aviation toys and tasked with learning new things. While “Maverick” was in postproduction, he got a call from Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”; the frequent Cruise collaborator was asking him to join the cast, no audition required. “I put the phone on mute and jumped up and down and screamed,” Davis said. “That was my first offer, and having an offer is an actor’s dream.”Lewis PullmanThe back story for his character’s call sign didn’t make it into the movie.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: BobWhere you’ve seen him before: “Outer Range,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “Catch-22”Of all the call signs, Pullman’s “Bob” (also his character’s first name) is the most mysteriously straightforward. “Bob is reclusive and quiet and a hard nut to crack,” Pullman said. “One of the original drafts had this moment where he kind of earned his stripes, and Hangman says, ‘I think I know what Bob stands for: Big Ol’ Balls.’ They didn’t end up using that, but it gave me a reference for Bob’s trajectory. He starts out as this unassuming guy, who then finds his strength.” Pullman needed strength of his own when Cruise walked into the first table read. Despite being the son of the actor Bill Pullman, Lewis was star-struck. “Tom basically ripped through the doors. His motorcycle in the background. He’s got his helmet on. The sun is glistening. He takes his helmet off, and his hair is perfect,” he said. “Tom is like Cary Grant and Buzz Aldrin and Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel all woven into one man.”Jay EllisAs a boy, the actor saw the original “Top Gun” with his father on an Air Force base.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 40“Maverick” role: PaybackWhere you’ve seen him before: “Insecure,” “Escape Room,” “The Game”Ellis distinctly recalls the day his father, who was then a mechanic in the Air Force, took him to see the first “Top Gun” in a theater on base in Austin, Texas. “I remember just looking up at the screen thinking, ‘I want to do that. Whatever those guys are up there doing, I want to be a part of that somehow,’” he said. Rather than enlist, Ellis became an actor. Fast forward three decades, and he found himself shooting “Maverick” and paying homage to the original’s beach volleyball scene with a game of beach football as the camera panned over the cast’s glistening muscles for a sun-dappled montage. “We probably went through five different types of oil because the makeup team was trying to figure out what wouldn’t soak into everyone’s skin so quickly,” Ellis said. “We started out with baby oil, then we moved on to argan oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. We switched to glycerin at one point. They were spraying us down with Evian bottles. It made for a very slippery game.”Danny RamirezHe thought he wouldn’t have to worry about his fear of flying. He was wrong.Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: FanboyWhere you’ve seen him before: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “On My Block,” “Assassination Nation”Before signing on, the actors had to check a box attesting they weren’t afraid of flying. “I lied,” Ramirez said with a laugh. “I was like, What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a Tom Cruise movie, that means he’ll be the one doing the stunts.” Without his usual commercial-flight routine of wine and noise-canceling headphones, Ramirez found himself struggling not to vomit as his F/A-18 rolled and dove through the air. The actors each had their own tricks to cope with motion sickness: Davis relied on Dramamine. Pullman preferred a preflight diet of rice and fresh ginger. For Ramirez, slowly building tolerance in incrementally smaller and faster planes was key. Adding to the degree of difficulty: They not only had to deliver their lines, but also set up the shots and adjust the cameras themselves once in the air. “I was like, ‘Are we going to get some kind of camera operator credit or what?’” he said. “Having to line up another jet going 500 miles an hour to stay within the frame was an experience I’m probably never going to have again.” More