Twisters brings a fresh spin to one of the best disaster movies of the '90s as Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Anthony Ramos pursue some extreme weather. However, it turns out that that fact and fiction blurred for one member of the starry cast.
Top Gun: Maverick star Powell tells Total Film in our new issue out on Thursday May 23, which features Twisters on the cover, that he brought his own tornado experience to the role.
"It’s actually something I got to incorporate a little bit into the movie," he explains in our cover feature. "I had an experience with this tornado in Jarrell, Texas. It was an F5 – one of the big ones. It decimated Jarrell. I was outrunning it with my aunt Taffy, and a car full of cousins. And I remember us having to take shelter. It didn’t get close enough to do any damage to us, but I remember the fear of being on the road when, you know, the biggest imaginable one was kind of coming through."
And he's not the only one, either. Growing up in the state of Arkansas, director Lee Isaac Chung was also very familiar with tornadoes. "At school, that was always the drill that we had to practice: the tornado drill," he tells Total Film. One of his earliest memories is as a four-year-old, three weeks into living on the Arkansas farm in a trailer home, when his parents called out, "There’s a tornado coming."
"We didn’t have any storm shelter," recalls Chung. "So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out."
Twisters acts as a new chapter to the original 1996 film Twister, rather than a direct sequel. This time around, it follows Kate Cooper (Edgar-Jones) as she gets lured back into storm chasing by her friend Javi (Ramos) to test out some new technology. While in the field, she crosses paths with charming and reckless social media star Tyler Owens (Powell). Sparks fly as the trio soon find themselves fighting for their lives amid the extreme weather.
As well as bringing his storm experience, Powell is also no stranger to legacy sequels, having played Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick. "I had the greatest film school ever working with Cruise and with the people that I got a chance to work with on that movie," adds Powell of that experience. "So a lot of those lessons ended up in Twisters in a great way… You figure out how you can honor the original, and also make it your own."
Twisters is released on July 19. And you can read more about it and a whole lot else besides in the new issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, May 23.
Check out the covers below:
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