Before hitting the field in Chad Powers, Glen Powell trained to become a quarterback. While he didn’t get any tips from his Texas Longhorns, the Top Gun: Maverick actor had two legendary NFL quarterbacks, Eli Manning and Peyton Manning, who coached him and put him in touch with the coach of a Kansas City Chiefs player.
“They connected me with this guy, Nic Shimonek, who’s Patrick Mahomes‘ coach,” Powell told Parade in an exclusive interview. “So I got lessons from him.”
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The Twisters star also worked with the Tennessee Titans’ former quarterbacks coach, Pat O’Hara. “He was really the guy that we would work every day with a full line of players,” Powell said of O’Hara. “I had a defense I was looking at, and I had my line I was throwing to. I had a full offensive line and receivers and everything.”
He added, “So I got the sort of full experience. And Eli and Peyton would weigh in on video and were coaching me all the way through to make sure we were legit.”
In addition to training for the role, Powell underwent a makeover to become Chad. When the Hollywood star’s mother, Cyndy Powell, first saw him in full prosthetics, she told Parade that she thought, “Who the heck is that!”
Early on for the show, Powell would try out different accents as he ordered coffee in prosthetics from a place in North Hollywood. One particular look that had the “most terrifying” face and long black hair, he called Rupert, which Powell described as “one of those guys that you’re like this is an absolute nightmare.”
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“But what I would do is I would put on the prosthetics and I’d go order a coffee down the way. And there was this one when I put Rupert on, it like cleared the coffee house out,” Powell recalled.
“Really?” co-star Steve Zahn asked.
“Yeah,” Powell replied. “They were like, ‘This guy’s gonna do something very suspicious.’”
To actually make the character Chad Powers feel “approachable and sweet,” was “easier said than done,” Powell noted. He also wanted Chad to be reminiscent of the character that executive producer Eli created for a 2022 sketch in his ESPN+ series Eli’s Places.
Hulu’s new original comedy series Chad Powers tells the story of disgraced college quarterback Russ Holliday, who reinvents himself as the title character for a second chance at playing football.
While Zahn pointed out that in Hollywood people can be reinvented by others, Powell believes that trying to reinvent yourself for someone else is dangerous.
“The one thing that I’m realizing is you just got to create. There’s always going to be noise, right? So you can’t let other people’s opinions or what they want your career to be, navigate what you want your career to be,” Powell said. “And so I really believe that if I’m chasing creative instincts, I’m going, ‘Hey, I’d like to see this movie, or I’d like to see this show,’ which is what Chad [Powers] is, I’m just like this is all the things that I would love to see in a show. As long as you chase those things, then people can kind of ascribe to whatever they want to. But I think it’s really dangerous to try to reinvent for other people.”
“It’s insanity,” Zahn remarked.
Glen agreed, adding, “I don’t want to hang around that person.”
Chad Powers premiered Sept. 30 on Hulu, with new episodes streaming on Tuesdays through Oct. 28.