Scream Queens’ Glenn Powell auditioned to play Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, son of the late Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, in Top Gun: Maverick, but Miles Teller ultimately snagged the role. However, star Tom Cruise, executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer and executives at Paramount Pictures and Skydance Media were reportedly so impressed with Powell that he was still cast in the sequel as "Hangman," one of the movie’s many flight trainees. And with a little under five months to go until Maverick finally takes to the skies, Powell is already certain that a scene involving him and his classmates playing a football game will become a source for gifs.
As fans of the original Top Gun know, one of its most iconic scenes where Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Anthony Edwards’ Goose play a game of volleyball against Val Kilmer’s Iceman and Rick Rossovich’s Slider. For Top Gun: Maverick, the trainees will left off some steam in a football game, and Glen Powell admitted that he and everyone else were under a lot of the pressure to ensure the scene looked great. He even recalled director Joseph Kosinski saying:
‘If you do this right, you're gonna be immortalized in a gif. You're gonna get your gif, your flex gif.’ I think we get it. It's coming. The gif's coming.
The chances of Top Gun: Maverick’s football scene becoming anywhere near as iconic as Top Gun’s volleyball scene seem slim, but as Glen Powell informed ET, he’s sure that folks who see the sequel will pull gifs from it. If nothing else, it sounds like he was successful in delivering his own “flex,” no doubt mirroring when Slider posed for everyone watching during volleyball. Could Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys” also play during the football game? After all, we are being treated to another rendition of “Danger Zone” in Maverick.
As for the overall experience of shooting of Top Gun: Maverick’s football scene, Monica Barbaro, who plays “Phoenix,” recalled how Glen Powell would do “some sort of celebration” in between every take that usually involves him running around and screaming, and that “peak Glen energy” would pump everyone else up. Barbaro continued:
I put on the song 'It's Raining Men,' and I was like, 'Guys, dance!' I have this incredible video that I don't know if I'll ever be able to show anybody. But of [Powell] just slow-motion [dancing] and then everyone else getting involved. [There was] very little clothing. It's oiled up. When you put in that effort, when you work as hard as you guys did to become as ripped as you were, I mean you gotta celebrate it. It's worth enjoying at that point. It's worth taking off your shirt and dancing.
Whatever kind of critical reception Top Gun: Maverick ends up receiving, it sounds like it was a fun production. Both Glen Powell and Monica Barbaro also pointed out how the big man himself, Tom Cruise, was “really hands on” in the making of the sequel and would give someone a fist bump if they accomplished something on set.
Set more than three decades after the original Top Gun, Top Gun: Maverick sees Tom Cruise’s Pete Mitchell back at the eponymous flight school to teach a new generation of pilots and lead a detachment of graduates on a specialized mission. Along with the previously mentioned actors, Maverick’s cast includes Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Charles Parnell, Manny Jacinto, Jay Ellis and many more.
Top Gun: Maverick flies into theaters on June 26, and we here at CinemaBlend will provide more updates on the sequel as they come in. Feel free to learn when this year’s other movies will drop with our 2020 release schedule.
