Glen Powell Reveals He Once Bombed a Meeting with ‘Legend’ Dustin Hoffman: ‘I Left So Defeated’ 

Glen Powell is opening up about an embarrassing meeting he held with Dustin Hoffman early in his acting career.

Powell, 37, admitted that he once bombed an opportunity to read a script with Hoffman, 88, when The Running Man star appeared on Hot Ones Thursday, Nov. 13, to promote his new action movie. When Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked Powell to describe how difficult his journey to stardom has been since he first began acting, the actor recalled meeting Hoffman by chance at a dinner early in his time living in Los Angeles. Powell found that the two-time Oscar winner had seen him in 2007’s The Great Debaters.

“The fact that he saw this movie just blew my mind,” Powell recalled. “I was like, ‘This is the coolest moment of my entire life.’ He said, ‘You’re a good actor.’ I was like ‘Oh dude, thank you.’ He goes, ‘I got something, I got something for you. Let’s keep in touch.’ ”

Days later, as Powell remembered, Hoffman invited him to his office to read a script together, but the meeting quickly went downhill. “I started reading [the pages], but I was so in awe that Dustin Hoffman was sitting across from me,” Powell said. “He’s one of my favorite actors of all time. As I’m reading, I’m watching the life drain from his eyes being like, ‘This guy sucks so bad.’ And I was like, ‘Oh no.’ 

“And you can like [it]—I’m watching him, I’m losing him. And then I’m being like, ‘Yeah, you’re losing him,’ and then I look back and I’m losing him even more. And I left so defeated,” he added with a laugh.

Powell received his first onscreen acting credit in 2003’s Spy Kids 3: Game Over, which released when he was a teenager. The Top Gun: Maverick star has openly discussed his struggle to find sustained acting work into the 2010s before his stock began to rise.

“What you start to realize is that all this business is play,” Powell said on Hot Ones. “You start looking at these guys as legends and then you start looking at them as collaborators who are just trying to make magic for audiences around the world.”

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“You know, I think that’s the difference,” he added. “I think the excitement about this business hasn’t worn off, but I think my perspective has.”

The Running Man, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 book of the same name, is in theaters Nov. 14.