Twister Sequel Twisters Adds Daisy Edgar-Jones

Daisy Edgar-Jones, best known for her role in the British miniseries Normal People, is reportedly in talks to star in Twisters, an upcoming reinvention of Twister, the 1996 Universal/Amblin action movie starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. The film, which will not be a direct sequel to the original blockbuster, is set to be directed by Minari‘s Lee Isaac Chung from a script by The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, who first reported the casting, “Edgar-Jones will star in the project as a former storm chaser who, after surviving a disastrous tornado encounter, now works a desk job. However, she will soon be forced to, you guessed it, go out into the breach once more.” There aren’t many other parts in place yet, but the movie is expected to go into production this spring, so more announcements are likely coming soon.

Edgar-Jones is the second Normal People star to land a big tentpole franchise film in recent months, following Paul Mescal, who will be the star of Ridley Scott’s upcoming sequel to Gladiator. She is currently filming the feature adaptation On Swift Horses directed by Daniel Minihan, where she will star opposite Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 star Will Poulter.

Frank Marshall, known for the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises, is producing via his banner, the Kennedy/Marshall Company. 

The original Twister was co-written by Michael Crichton and produced by Kathleen Kennedy, who is married to Marshall. It was directed by Jan de Bont, who had blown up thanks to his work on the Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock action vehicle (no pun intended) Speed two years earlier. Twister was a blockbuster spectacle that heralded a lot of upcoming trends in movie-making, including CGI post-production (courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic), and a global box office haul of $494.5 million, making it the second-highest-grossing movie of 1996.

“I read that like a month or two ago. I said, ‘Wow. Are they going to do the F5 now? I bet you that’s what it is,’” de Bont said during a recent interview. “You cannot do it by making it bigger. That as a movie hardly ever works. You have to come up … with people actually involved in it. You cannot just … it’s like, I’ll work on the destruction scene. We’re going to get worse and whole cities are going to get destroyed. That’s exactly like falling in the trap of having the special effects completely take over.”