The Running Man: Glen Powell Reveals Personal Blessing from Arnold Schwarzenegger

Long before he starred in The Running Man, Glen Powell had a professional relationship with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Kind of. See, way back in 2014, back in a time before Top Gun: Maverick or working with Richard Linklater, Powell appeared in The Expendables 3, an old school action flick which starred the likes of Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Wesley Snipes. And as Powell confided to a New York Comic Con audience over the weekend, he nicked tricks of the trade by watching those icons on set, including with how Sly would do some quick weight reps before shooting a scene—a tip Powell applies to this day on films like Twisters and now Running Man.

Still, while Powell and director Edgar Wright have been open that they will homage the 1987 cult classic Running Man in their reimagining (even as the new film steers much closer to Stephen King’s bleak source material), they have remained mum about how they got in contact with the former Governiator. So it seemed like an appropriate thing to ask when we caught up with the new Ben Richards for a quick chat at NYCC.

“Patrick Schwarzenegger’s a great buddy of mine, and Arnold and I worked together on Expendables 3,” Powell says with a grin. “So I said ‘Hey, do you think I can talk to your dad before we get going on this thing? Just to get his perspective.’ Because you never want to step into someone else’s running shoes without understanding how they feel about it, because everybody feels different about how to occupy that character. He made that character iconic, so I wanted to make sure I got his blessing.”

Powell continues, “He was so supportive of our movie. He really talked about the process of how they made that movie, how we can kind of improve, why he loved the book so much. He’s really just an open book and really a cheerleader.”

While Schwarzenegger has yet to see the finished film, Powell teased earlier during the panel there is easter egg homage to the original big screen Richards in the new movie, complete with it being revealed in the movie’s alternate future, Schwarzenegger is now on the hundred dollar bill. Apparently the former Governor of California approved a great deal, telling Wright “I’m glad you made me so valuable.”

“I can’t wait to show him this movie, he’s so excited,” Powell adds to us, “and I think it’s been amazing to go on that journey of going from being like 13th on the call sheet for Expendables 3 to now getting to reprise one of Arnold’s greats.”

Yet one of the main reasons he’s making this particular film is to specifically work with Edgar Wright. As Powell previously told us in the latest issue of Den of Geek magazine, he was a fan of Wright since before he moved to Los Angeles in 2008 to pursue acting. He elaborated on that over the weekend by telling us how much Wright’s earliest films meant to him when growing up in Austin, Texas.

“Obviously when you saw Shaun of the Dead for the first time, you knew he was a special filmmaker. He’s one of those guys where I go, ‘Oh what a vision, what a control of tone. What an ability to [take] a genre staple and reinvent it.’ … I think Hot Fuzz is one of the most brilliant movies ever. I’ve rewatched that with my buddies in Texas over and over, and over.”

Powell goes on to specifically cite the “Michael Bay parallax” shots in Hot Fuzz as a moment imprinted on his mind—the bit where the cameras spin around Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as if they’re Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reincarnated. After that bit, as well as Frost going all Patrick Swayze/Kathryn Bigelow in Point Break, Powell became a lifelong fan. “He just appeals to the fan, he appeals to the audience, and that’s one of the things that I just love about this movie. You’re taking all the movies he’s made, and then this uses all those skillsets he’s developed over an entire career and puts it in one movie.”

For Wright it was also a chance to tick something off his own bucket list: adapting a Stephen King story for the first time, as well as one he’s publicly admitted he wanted to remake. In fact, Wright tells us that this Running Man came about because producer Simon Kinberg read a quote from Wright in 2017 where he said if he ever remade one movie, it would be Running Man.

“It was something I already wanted to do and perhaps mentioned in some interviews,” says Wright. “So Simon Kinberg remembered that, and I got an email one day, and it was almost like the best case scenario where this wasn’t something I was actively chasing. Because I had looked into it before, and there were some issues with the rights. But then I got an email in 2021 from Simon Kinberg that said, ‘Is it true you have some interest in adapting The Running Man?’ And I was like yes, and it literally started there.”

Wright muses there’s an irony that of all his films, only The Running Man and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have been adaptations, and both of those films he wound up adapting with co-writer Michael Bacall. However, in the case of Running Man, it came specifically from an appreciation of King and this particular story. While Wright doesn’t recall if it was the first King novel he ever read, it was among them in those formative years of early adolescence.

“I think the first King I ever read was Night Shift, which was a collection of short stories,” Wright says. “But I know, because I still have them, there was Salem’s Lot, Christine, IT, Skeleton Crew, and Night Shift. And I think my brother had Pet Sematary and The Shining. And then I had the Bachman books, so I read all of those, but I’m not sure which was first.”

With regard to The Running Man and the other three books King wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman—including The Long Walk—there was an anger that appealed to Wright’s young mind.

“I was about 13 or 14 when I read those, and I think also if you’re growing up as a horror fan, Stephen’s books [in that era] are the first adult books that you read,” Wright says. “And I think the 1982 [Running Man] novel still has a lot of power. It’s a really angry book. Richard Bachman was sort of like Stephen King’s Richard Stark… the idea being if he wakes up and it’s sunny, he writes as Stephen King; and if you wake up on a cloudy day, it’s Richard Bachman.”

The book has a cynicism and edge to it that is all the more remarkable when one realizes King set it in a fictional 2025 where millions of Americans are brainwashed by television into a complacency about their situation. In one of the clips screened exclusively at NYCC, there is a chilling bit where Coleman Domingo’s host of the Running Man TV show—a fictional series-within-the-movie which is a bit like American Idol meets the UFC—tells his rabid audience that Powell’s Ben Richards is a criminal who stole state secrets and gave it to a “union.” When Ben calls BS on that lie off-mic, Domingo’s host whispers with a shrug, “Man, that’s showbiz.”

“It’s interesting that in the time since the book was written, reality TV has become so mainstream and has been for at least 25 years,” Wright observes while considering Domingo’s line. “But I think more recently, people have started to understand how it’s manipulated and understand how those shows are manipulated and edited. And it’s interesting while writing, a lot of that material is in the book. And that clip you saw today is only the half of what’s said on the stage. It gets more fiery than that! It’s like untruths about Ben Richards beamed into millions of homes to make everyone want to see him die. He kind of becomes America’s most wanted.”

Still, Wright seems hesitant to draw too strong a line between the movie’s dystopian future and our current state of affairs. Wright is quicker to point out how this moment echoes what we’re still learning about the scripted nature of reality television, talk shows, and other forms of so-called infotainment.

Says Wright, “Just before we started filming with Coleman, that Jerry Springer documentary arrived on Netflix and that documentary seemed to kind of reinforce everything we had in the script. Both Josh Brolin and Coleman said, ‘Have you seen this Jerry Springer documentary on Netflix?’ And [they] go, ‘it’s basically the movie.’ So we had already done our research on that stuff, and then all of these things are confirmed.”

It also creates a hell of a backdrop for a Running Man game show where the entire world is out for Ben’s blood. Which we imagine leaves a lot of opportunities for Powell to get Michael Bay-inspired parallax camera shots of his own.

The Running Man is in theaters on Nov. 14.