Glen Powell Issues Update on Cannibal Story: ‘Questioning My Whole Life’

Glen Powell shocked the internet when he shared a gruesome story about a first date—but turns out, it’s actually an urban legend.

Appearing on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast, the Hollywood actor told a story he had been told about a friend of his younger sister going on a first date. She claimed to have gone back to the man’s apartment, where he proceeded to give her a massage. Starting to feel uncomfortable, she left the apartment in a hurry, and eventually found out that he had used a “black market lotion that breaks down skin for human consumption.”

Powell told the story while promoting his new Netflix film Hit Man, with clips of it going viral on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok.

While many people were shocked and disgusted by Powell’s story, others wondered if Powell had fallen for a lie. Following the online conversation surrounding Powell’s tale, the actor shared a link to a BuzzFeed article that revealed he had fallen for an urban legend.

Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Powell for comment on Tuesday.

“Props to my little sister’s friend who told her this dating story…I’ve been telling this for years. I’m questioning my whole life now…” Powell posted to X, taking it on the chin. “False alarm. Back rubs are back.”

At the time of writing, his post had been viewed 381,600 times.

The BuzzFeed article referred to Snopes, a fact-checking website that researches urban legends, rumors and misinformation, that said stories like Powell’s are a “years-old urban legend.”

“Versions of this legend that circulated in April 2009 were set in typical Spring Break locales (e.g., Jamaica, Florida) and changed the nature of the dark secret from necrophilia to cannibalism: Unsuspecting girls come down with puzzling medical conditions (e.g., fungi, lesions, sores) developed from having intimate contact with young men who don’t merely have sex with corpses, but who actually eat them—the legend thereby intimating that these girls risked not just their health but their very lives through their injudicious flirting,” the Snopes article reads.

“If we divorce ourselves from the ickier aspects of this legend … we can see this as a cautionary tale about the dangers of incautious intimacy with those we don’t know well, perhaps more broadly expressive of our misgivings about what even our long-term partners might be keeping hidden from us.”

People have taken to Powell’s post to say that this latest update just makes the whole situation even more amusing.

“I’m so glad ‘I was told this and I thought it was true so I told everyone but it’s not true and now I feel stupid’ is a universal experience,” one person commented.

“this makes it even funnier,” said another.

A third person added: “love that you never questioned the authenticity of this story [crying emoji].”

When Powell originally shared the story on Therapuss, he told Shane that his sister’s friend was almost eaten by a cannibal. After she had gone back to her date’s house, she started “getting weird vibes.”

“So, he starts massaging her shoulders. Everything just feels odd. She’s like, ‘I gotta get out of here.’ It’s a little weird, he’s like, ‘Please don’t leave.’ She leaves,” Powell said during his podcast appearance.

“Her skin starts itching like crazy the next day. She goes to the doctor, and he does a test on her skin. It turns out it’s a black market lotion that breaks down skin for human consumption.

“This man was rubbing lotion on her body to eat her. The doctor is like you have to give me this person’s address and you should call the police. They go to this guy’s house, and he had several bodies in the house.”

Thankfully for everyone involved, this story isn’t true and has been an urban legend for decades.