Glen Powell and Adria Arjona’s new film “Hit Man” is getting a lot of attention. For starters, as pointed out in an InStyle interview published this week, the two have fantastic chemistry — something that helped when it was time to craft sex scenes for the film.
“Adria did this really, really smart thing where she would print out — we would send images to each other of things we found to be hot and sexy,” he said. “And so we would talk out these sex scenes and these images and these poses and these moments.”
The result, he continued, was making “Hit Man” a “really sexy” film, which he attributed to using “things that are striking and hot and emotional, but they’re really things that we [came up with] together as co-stars.”
Arjona agreed. “That was really beautiful that they allowed me to have a space to bring something that I feel comfortable with and wanted to do on-screen,” she shared.
Powell added that the amount of time the pair spent together also helped. “The more time we spent together, which was pretty much all day, every day and very late nights, we became more comfortable with these moments. There was no awkwardness around these conversations,” he said.
“It did feel like the ideal version of going to work as an actor: ‘Hey, we’re going to play with our friends. Let’s just have the best time ever,’” he added. “Especially in this environment, with these scenes; there’s a lot of eyeballs on these sex scenes, right? There’s a lot of people that are trying to determine what is sexy, what is appropriate.”
Powell shared his feelings about imposter syndrome coming in to filming “Hit Man,” a project where he’s also a producer and cowriter alongside acclaimed director Richard Linklater.
“This is one where there was a lot of that imposter syndrome that I think comes right before you start. Where you convince a great filmmaker — one of the best — to write a movie with you,” Powell explained. “You raise the money, you get an incredible actress, you con everybody on the way to joining this ride, and then you’re like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’”
In other words, he added, “If you have an ego enough where you go into a project being like, ‘I’m hot s–t,’ you’re probably going to f–k it up.”
The feeling of imposter syndrome, he continued, isn’t a bad thing — it’s a sign of an actor that cares about what they’re putting out into the world. “There’s an interesting thing about it, because you come from a place where you really want to be good for people. You don’t want to let people down. It’s a good thing because it means you’re going to do everything you possibly can. If you feel too safe going into something, I think it’s a bad thing. If you feel too deserving of something, I think it’s bad.”
Arjona, who plays Anathema on “Good Omens,” also revealed in the interview that she tried to quit the series due to her own struggles with confidence. “I did. Because it was too much pressure. I was so scared. And it was the first role that was ever just offered to me, which is so bizarre,” she said. “I was at a point in my career that nothing should have been offered to me. And [Neil Gaiman] was like, ‘No, it’s you. I see you and I only see you in this role.’ And I was like, ‘How the hell do you even know who I am?‘”
Read the full interview with Glen Powell and Adria Arjona here.
