A fast-rising star with “Top Gun: Maverick” and the rom-com sleeper hit “Anyone But You,” Texan Glen Powell is winning raves with “Hit Man,” a most unusual and original comedy romance.

While it has the familiar “inspired by a true story,” it is a real saga of impersonation where a mild-mannered Texas teacher assisted the police by wearing a wire and pretending to be a hit man for hire.

“It was early on in the pandemic and I stumbled upon this article in Texas Monthly called ‘Hit Man’ by Skip Hollingsworth,” Powell, 35, recalled in a virtual press conference.

“Immediately it was so clear there was a compelling character there in the real life Gary Johnson. He was a psychology professor who actually moonlighted with the police department, did AV equipment, was an ornithologist. A Zen Buddhist.

“I was just, ‘This is such an incredible character piece!’ But I didn’t know where it went. All I knew is that there was a fascinating guy here. They called him, the Laurence Olivier of fake hitman because he approached the job differently.

“Instead of just being the hitman for hire who sits across from someone who is trying to kill their husband or wife or business partner, he embodied their fantasy of what a fake hitman is — because hitmen don’t exist.

“He took this skillset to a whole new level, putting on these disguises. All these different things. He also had this professorial part of his job. So there was already these ideas of identity baked into the way he thought, the way he moved through life.”

It was natural for Powell as co-writer to go to another Texas native, the writer-director-producer Richard Linklater (“Boyhood,” “School of Rock”) who had cast him in his 2016 comedy “Everybody Wants Some.”

“I was so excited to get this call from Glen,” Linklater, 63, said, “because that story had been kicking around in my head. I had had a couple meetings on it over the years. But it didn’t really work as a film because there was this repetition. It didn’t really go anywhere.

“I told Glen that and it was the pandemic. So what else was there to do? We had hours of conversations and Glen loosened the logjam when he said, ‘Well, what if we deviate? Why stick to the facts?’”

They invented a female client Madison (Adria Arjona) who Gary falls in love with – and needs to save from a jail sentence. This leads to more impersonations.

“Once that floodgate opened, we were off to the races,” Linklater realized. “We just started having these great ideas. And the last two-thirds of the movie comes out of that.”

“Hit Man” streams on Netflix June 7.