This weekend, Glen Powell is going to enter history alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger as he becomes the second Hollywood star to lead a film based on Stephen King’s The Running Man. It will certainly keep the two stars linked in cinema history forever, although that link had already been set up, technically.
It’s only been in recent years that Glen Powell has truly achieved a “movie star” level of fame, which makes it easy to forget that he’s been making movies for a long time. Nearly 10 years ago, Powell was part of the ensemble cast of The Expendables 3, which included Arnold. As a recent post on The Running Man’s Instagram account shows us, it put Powell and Arnold on a tank together once. In the clip, Powell talks about the experience, saying:
I got to ride a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger on the La Croisette for press for Expendables 3.
The Expendables 3 may not be the sort of movie one would necessarily associate with the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s indeed where the movie celebrated its premiere, and as part of the film’s promotion, the cast rode a tank down the main thoroughfare. It’s clear from Powell's video of the experience that it was a wild time for him.
To be fair, The Expendables 3 wasn’t exactly the most memorable of movies. There’s a reason it took nearly a decade for The Expendables 4 to even happen. Not that any of that was the fault of either Arnold or Glen Powell. It was Powell’s biggest role to date, and the video shows just how excited he is to be part of this group of stars, including seeing his face on a banner.
While Powell indicates the experience was the high point of his career at the time, not all of it was so great for him. Powell has also talked about getting into a fight with a bouncer at Cannes because, not being a movie star at the time, nobody recognized him, and somebody didn’t think he belonged in the VIP section of a club, leading to a physical altercation.
Powell didn’t make a lot of money for his Expendables 3 role, but it was a lot more money than he had seen at the time. It seems making a movie connected to Arnold Schwarzenegger was very good for Powell’s career, as it would be again many years later.
It’s still pretty wild to realize now that Powell and Schwarzenegger were once sitting next to each other talking about riding on a tank, and a decade later, Powell would be reprising the role of Ben Richards in one of Schwarzenegger’s most famous action roles. The two movies will clearly be very different, with the new Running Man movie being a much more faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s original story, but we can be sure there will be plenty of comparisons between the two once the new movie hits theaters this weekend.
