Glen Powell May Be the Star of ‘Hit Man,’ but The Movie Wouldn’t Work Without Adria Arjona

It makes sense that America, or at least some enthusiastic and very online segment of it, is in the throes of Glen Powell mania: After appearing in Top Gun: Maverick, one of the biggest movies of the post-2020 era, Powell has starred in pretty much the only theatrical-hit rom-com of the decade (Anyone But You) and now has a funnier, weirder rom-com of sorts on Netflix. Not only is Hit Man a Netflix viewership success, Powell himself co-wrote it, making its goofs on his ramrod-straight on-screen persona seem particularly clever and intentional.

Yet the offbeat chemistry of Hit Man probably wouldn’t fizz the same way without Powell’s co-star, Adria Arjona. While Powell’s milquetoast Gary dons a variety of over-the-top disguises while pretending to be various badass hit men and eventually becomes oddly comfortable in his fake role, Arjona’s Madison is more steadfast. She meets Gary (in disguise as a hitman named Ron) because she’s hoping to hire someone to kill her abusive husband, and though Gary/Ron temporarily dissuades her, she’s never really, fully convinced that a better solution exists. (To be fair, her husband does also attempt to hire a hit man to kill her.) In some ways, it’s a trickier part to play, because we don’t have access to much of Madison’s interiority, and she ultimately is – for better or worse – more or less who she appears to be when Gary first meets her: A cross between a rom-com heroine and a femme fatale, where neither side winds up fully giving way to the other.

That genre flexibility is at the heart of Hit Man’s big showstopping scene where Powell and Arjona must act their way out of danger while communicating with each other, coaching each other through their newest layer of playacting. It’s a masterful duet that only works if both Powell and Arjona are locked in. Powell gets to play more dominant in the scene, dictating the story with his notes app, but it’s Arjona whose perverse pleasure in the situation keeps emerging from her face. A line like “he wasn’t random; he was a damn good dancer” could be real cornball stuff, but Arjona manages to sell her love and lust for Gary, her trust of him overcoming her fear of getting caught, and the way these feelings might fuel her recklessness, all while pretending to be someone she both is (a woman with a lousy ex) and isn’t (innocent of murder). Even someone who’s seen her in multiple other movies and shows might be moved to ask: Who is this find?

Like Powell, Arjona has indeed been kicking around a while, appearing in movies like the Pacific Rim sequel and Michael Bay’s 6 Underground, and TV shows like Good Omens and True Detective (season two, but still). She even has her own action figure from her work as Bix Caleen, Cassian Andor’s hometown girl on Andor. On that show, she’s more serious and less flirtatious, which is also true of Arjona’s other 2024 so far. In The Absence of Eden, a dramatic thriller about the eventual intersection of a conflicted ICE agent (Garrett Hedlund) and an undocumented woman (Zoe Saldaña) fleeing Mexico, Arjona plays Yadira, a young mother dating and falling in love with Hedlund’s character. Superficially, the part is actually pretty similar to Hit Man’s Madison: A woman from a difficult background (albeit revealed more gradually than Madison’s), in a relationship with a handsome white guy that involves both deception and steamy sex scenes.

The movie’s social-issue intensity and visual grace courtesy of director Marco Perego (also Saldaña’s husband) should give her work some more dramatic heft – and it does, to a point. But with Saldaña taking the lion’s share of the movie’s suffering and Hedlund assuming the white-establishment POV, the movie (which runs under 80 minutes without credits), there isn’t much room for Arjona to stretch. Hit Man may be a little bit flip and crowdpleasing about some dark subjects; as a Linklater-style philosophical treatise on identity, it’s (to quote another Powell-starring Linklater movie) here for a good time, not necessarily for a long time. But even if Powell and Linklater have created a female character who’s more convenient genre construct than fully explored human being, they also allow her to be as capricious and heedlessly charming as her male counterpart. Compare this to The Absence of Eden, which literally leaves her character naked on the floor, in a scene where Perego’s sense of artistry perhaps gets the better of him. (In their last shot together, Arjona and Hedlund both look they’ve been posed for an undergraduate life-drawing class.)

It’s easy to see, then, how things could go south for Arjona, despite her obvious talent and charisma. Her next movie, Blink Twice, is the feature writing and directing debut for Zoë Kravitz – though she’s not the lead, compared to Powell’s toplining of the upcoming Twisters. Hit Man makes it clear that Arjona can do comedy, romance, and noirish thrillers, sometimes simultaneously – and, moreover, highlights the advantage of actors doing movies that might not seem immediately classifiable. Maybe it’s a dodge that Hit Man never quite nails down how Madison operates. While Powell readjusts his persona before our eyes, Arjona keeps the audience guessing.