Tom Cruise urged Glen Powell to 'lean into the douchebaggery of it all' while filming Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise helped pilot Glen Powell's performance in Top Gun: Maverick with some advice: lean into the douchebaggery.

Powell, who portrayed bad boy naval aviator Jake 'Hangman' Seresin in the Top Gun sequel, told Kate Hudson during Variety's latest "Actors on Actors" that Cruise helped him land the movie's explosive ending. "Sometimes you can fall into the trap of wanting to be liked on camera," Powell said. "And in a movie like this, where you know there's going to be a lot of eyes on it, you don't want to be Draco Malfoy."

Cruise gave him some advice: "For the ending to work, you have to completely lean into that. Everybody else in the movie is questioning their own ability. You're the only guy that's not questioning it. So if there's any sort of apology in anything you say, the movie doesn't work. Lean into the douchebaggery of it all," Powell said, later quipping that he keeps "getting cast as a douchebag."

"Even the thing I did with [Oliver Hudson, Kate's brother] in Scream Queens, where I'm a super douche," Powell said.

The actor starred in two big aviation films this year with the addition of Devotion, based on the true story of Jesse Brown (portrayed by Jonathan Majors), the first Black aviator in U.S. Navy history. Powell — who initially auditioned for the role of Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller — said Cruise emboldened him to take on both projects.

"I found that [Devotion] book and developed that for five years, so when I missed out on the Rooster role, the conversation I had with Tom was, 'Hey, I didn't get this role, but I actually have a naval aviation movie I've been developing. Maybe that's just what I'm going to do,'" he recalled. "And he convinced me that there's room for two. And I'm really happy, because everything I learned on Top Gun got to be infused into Devotion."

Powell isn't the only pupil of the Tom Cruise School of Advice. Emily Blunt recently revealed that Cruise offered some blunt advice on set of the sci-fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow, which required the actors to don heavy robotic suits. "The first time I put it on I just started to cry in front of Tom and he didn't know what to do," Blunt recalled. "I was like, 'Tom, I'm not sure how I'm going to get through this shoot,' and just started to cry. I said, 'I'm just feeling a bit panicky about the whole shoot.' He just stared at me for a long time, not knowing what to do, and he goes, 'Come on, stop being such a p---y, okay?'"

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