You’ve all been at a wedding, and it’s a beautiful day, and everything’s going like a dream – and then the best man unfurls his after-dinner speech and everything falls apart. “I’ve witnessed it up close,” says Glen Powell, and those experiences fuel his new audio comedy, The Best Man’s Ghostwriter.
In the new Audible Original podcast by writer/director (and former best man scriptwriter) Matt Starr, Powell plays Nate. He’s the guy you hire to stop you from wrecking an entire wedding day with a bad joke about the groom’s exes or the bride’s family. Powell explains, “Guys overserve themselves, and they tend to panic under the pressure and say exactly the thing that they’re trying not to say.” That’s where Nate comes in, to help the best man tell his best friend exactly how he feels about him without embarrassing everyone. But with his own wedding imminent, and a whole unresolved minefield of emotions about his ex-best friend, is Nate really in a position to help anyone?
“I went down one of those holes of worst best man speeches ever. … It’s unbelievable how wrong these things can go.”
Of course, part of the humor of The Best Man’s Ghostwriter is in hearing terrible best man speeches – because there’s bombing on stage, and then there’s bombing on the biggest day of your best friend’s life with their wife staring daggers at you. Before recording started, Powell says, “I went down one of those holes of worst best man speeches ever. I recommend going down that hole, because it’s unbelievable how wrong these things can go.”
As for Nate, Powell plays him as proof of the old adage that those who can’t do, teach. “[He’s] somebody who considers himself the great communicator in a really funny way [but] is emotionally stunted and emotionally closed off.” His learning curve represents one of Powell’s favorite kind of character arcs: “Know-it-alls who find their comeuppance and their humanity, and you get to crack open their heart over the course of the story.”
While the show is driven by Powell’s bourbon-smooth Central Texas tones; because it’s audio only, there’s no sign of Powell’s signature leading-man looks. Right now, he may be glad of that, due to the sweaty blonde mop he’s currently sporting. “This is character hair,” he laughs from on set in Atlanta. That’s where he’s filming Chad Powers, his upcoming comedy series for Hulu based on an original sketch for the ESPN+ series Eli’s Places. It’s yet another project in what can only be described as the Year of Glen Powell, starting with the critical and streaming success of his Netflix comedy with Richard Linklater, Hit Man, followed by the blockbuster success of disaster flick Twisters. Amidst all this, he jetted over to South Africa to film action movie Huntington opposite Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), and he’s scheduled to start filming a new version of Stephen King’s The Running Man with Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright.
Making a radio drama in the middle of this may sound like a diversion, but for Powell it’s just a way for him to live up to his career mantra: “Chase whatever compels you. … The more careful your dance steps are, it becomes a lot less fun for everybody. You’ve got to chase your instincts and have a good time.”
Not that it’s all glamorous. The press day for The Best Man’s Ghostwriter was a couple of hours on Zoom in a trailer with malfunctioning AC, at the height of the Georgia summer. “I am cooking,” he confesses, but he’s not complaining, “I’m in a zone, careerwise, where I’m trying to work with people I really admire, voices I think are really cool, in mediums that are teaching me stuff. I’m trying always to push myself out of the nest and out of the box.”
Powell’s no stranger to life behind the voice actor’s mic. He voiced Trent the dolphin in episodes of Madagascar spin-off All Hail King Julien, guested on Rick and Morty, was a series regular in Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, and got the ultimate laurels for a celebrity in the animation world – a sketch on Robot Chicken. But lesser known is that one of his very first acting gigs was a voice job: playing the Urchin in Deus Ex: Invisible War. The 2003 performance is far from his most famous role, but Powell’s found that it’s given him surprising street cred among video game developers. “That was a revolutionary game, in terms of the player format and the way they engaged and the maps.”
“[I remember] leaving that booth looking like I’d been beat up. I was like, ‘Damn, that’s a lot of work for a tiny little character.’”
However, it grounded him in an essential screen acting skill: ADR, or automated dialogue replacement, “when they’re like, ‘We have to re-record this dialogue,’ and you’re having to do the grunts and the screams and the efforts and the panting.”
Moreover, it gave Powell an appreciation for the unique challenges and opportunities of voice acting. “You’re only able to play with one instrument instead of the entire orchestra, which I get to do with film or TV. You are isolated to just the violin, and you have to entertain the audience with just the one instrument.”
Most of his voice work to date was for animated productions, where the actor knows the visuals will complement their work. However, he took the leap into pure audio storytelling in 2021 with his first project for Audible, baseball drama 10 Days. The project left him intrigued by the possibilities of audio dramas, “[even if] I didn’t feel I truly understood the medium. On this one, I got the chance to guide it a lot more and have a stronger creative hand in and got to bring my friends into [it].”
The idea that a movie star doing audio drama is somehow beneath them is a recent idea. It’s no coincidence that the Golden Ages of radio and Hollywood intersected, and actors would jump between the two media: Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s it was common practice for stars to do a shortened radio play version of their newest movie, as a form of promotion. The lines would be the same, but the delivery often wildly different, and Powell put that down to the restrictions of radio. “When you only have that one instrument to play with on a storytelling level, sometimes [the audience] is more engaged.”
Knowing that he was having to really consider the audience in his performance created a new challenge that Powell relished. “It was a really fun thing for me, acting wise, to really flirt with that and try to understand it and try to do it to the best of my abilities. … There was a level of focus that I found to be really exciting where I go into every scene and I go, ‘What’s the tone of the scene, how do you actually engage with somebody, and how is an audience going to be listening to this?’”
The complete season of The Best Man’s Ghostwriter debuts on Audible on Sept. 12. Catch all 10 episode at audible.com.
This article appears in The 34th Annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.
