Glen Powell on blowing his final audition for Han Solo and his “wild take” on Batman

Glen Powell may be blowing up thanks to roles in Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You, but like any other actor, he struggled on his way to the top and lost out on some major roles, including Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

While chatting with GQ UK, Glen Powell spoke of coming “agonizingly” close to playing Han Solo, only to drop the ball at the last moment. “I can joke about it now,” he said, “[but] I blew that final audition.” The role ultimately went to Alden Ehrenreich, but with Powell’s charisma, you can see why Disney was interested in him in the first place. The actor also said he screwed up auditions for Captain America and Cowboys & Aliens over the years, but he’s accepted that it just wasn’t meant to be.

“It’s haunting when you blow those moments,” Powell said. “But that’s one of the parts of [the Hollywood myth] that’s not true. That was always somebody else’s ride to go on. You know what I mean? It was never yours to go on. If you put your time in, you’ll get your ride.“

Powell has expressed a disinterest in superhero roles; in fact, he was one of the few young actors in Hollywood who didn’t audition for the new Superman movie. However, he said he was “on the set of Twisters with David Corenswet when he got the call. He’s a hustler and he deserves it.” That said, he does have an interest in the Dark Knight. “I was always a Batman guy,” Powell said. “I would have a wild take on Batman. It definitely would not be like a Matt Reeves tone — it’d probably be closer to Keaton.” Even if Powell doesn’t get to play Batman at some point, he has appeared in a Batman movie, getting his head smashed in by Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

The actor has more than a few projects on his slate, including a remake of The Running Man with Edgar Wright, a reimagining of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, an unknown J.J. Abrams event film, and Top Gun 3.

Glen Powell will next be seen in Twisters, playing storm-chasing superstar Tyler Owens. He stars alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Kate Cooper, “a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.” The film will hit theaters on July 19th.