When Glen Powell signed on for his upcoming role in The Running Man, he expected grueling physical preparation. What he didn’t expect was a moment of sheer, immobilizing fear eight stories above the ground on a freezing winter night. While promoting the highly anticipated project, Powell revealed the exact instant he finally understood what it truly means to adopt Tom Cruise’s extreme, almost mythic mindset toward stunt work.
The scene sounded straightforward on paper: a high-speed rappel down the side of an industrial building. In reality, it was anything but simple. The production scheduled the shoot during a brutal cold snap, with temperatures plunging well below comfort levels. Wind whipped across the rooftop. The concrete beneath his boots felt like ice. Powell described standing at the edge, harness secured, staring down eight stories of empty air while his breath crystallized in front of him.
“The cold was paralyzing me,” he admitted. It wasn’t just discomfort; it was physical shutdown. His fingers stiffened. His legs felt locked in place. The height alone demanded focus, but the freezing air seemed to amplify every doubt. Moments before cameras rolled, Powell found himself battling the very real instinct to step back from the ledge.
That was when Cruise’s voice, and more importantly Cruise’s philosophy, kicked in.
Powell has previously spoken about the mentorship he received while working alongside Cruise, absorbing not just technical stunt advice but a mental framework. Cruise, famous for performing many of his own high-risk stunts, approaches fear as a logistical challenge rather than an emotional one. To him, terror isn’t a stop sign; it’s simply another variable to calculate.
In that frozen moment, Powell realized he had two choices: surrender to the paralysis or compartmentalize it. He chose the latter. He began breaking the situation down the way Cruise had taught him—anchor secure, rope tested, descent path mapped, crew in position. Instead of thinking, “This is terrifying,” he reframed it as, “This is technical.” The cold became a factor to manage. The height became a measurement. The fear became data.
That mental shift changed everything.
Once he stepped off the ledge, muscle memory and training took over. The descent was fast, controlled, and—once completed—euphoric. But what stayed with Powell wasn’t the adrenaline rush at the bottom. It was the clarity he found at the top. He understood that what separates performers like Cruise isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of it.
For Cruise, Powell said, overcoming paralyzing fear is practically routine—“just a Tuesday at the office.” That normalization of extreme physical challenge is what Powell now carries into his own work. The lesson wasn’t about bravado or recklessness. It was about preparation so thorough that fear has no room to dictate the outcome.
As anticipation builds for The Running Man, Powell’s rooftop plunge stands as a defining behind-the-scenes chapter in his evolution as an action star. It marked the night he stopped seeing stunts as isolated spectacles and started viewing them as solvable equations. Eight stories above the ground, in biting winter air, he didn’t just perform a rappel. He adopted a mindset—one that turns terror into technique and transforms hesitation into forward motion.