Glen Powell is taking on his biggest role yet: Ben Richards in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man. The Stephen King adaptation tell the tale of Ben, a father who is trying to get medicine for his sick daughter who ends up on a game show trying to run for his life.
I was lucky enough to speak with Powell about the role and one thing I found incredibly interesting about Ben Richards vs. Glen Powell is how Richards doesn’t necessarily care what people think about him. One of my favorite interviews Powell did recently was with Jake Shane on his Therapuss podcast. There, Powell talks about the social anxiety of leaving an event and second-guessing yourself and what you said to people.
Ben Richards in The Running Man is almost the complete opposite of that. With the exception of his wife and daughter, I don’t think he has thought once about what people think about him. So I asked Powell what it was like to kind of let those thoughts go with a character like Ben, who thrives in his own honesty and lack of care about what people think.
“Every time you play a character, you take aspects from that character. You say ‘okay, these are things I’ll leave at the door and these are things I’ll take.’ And I love the candor of Ben. I love the honesty. I love how he kind of cuts through the bs. He just kind of says what he means,” Powell said. “And it is an interesting thing because, look, we all have thoughts and we all have things on our mind. And the last thing I ever want to do is make people feel bad. It’s like, as Glen, I don’t like to make people feel bad but that’s the other thing is with Ben, sometimes honesty is the shortest distance, the best sense of grace is the greatest mercy, is just telling people what it is, you know?”
He went on to talk about how his own approach and Ben’s kind of go hand in hand. “There’s a twofold approach to it, but I don’t enjoy questioning what I say at he end of the night,” he said with a laugh. “We’re just wired that way. But I think there are good aspects of it. It means you actually care about people. But then there are also bad aspects, which is you wrestle with your own anxiety at the end of the night.”
Sufficed to say, Ben Richards doesn’t necessarily stay up late at night worrying if someone is mad at him.
You can see our full interview here:
The Running Man is in theaters on November 14.
(featured image: Paramount Pictures)
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