Twisters Featurette Goes Inside the Tornado-Chasing Sequel

The Twister sequel is "about revering and honoring, respecting, and loving nature," says director Lee Isaac Chung.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Universal Pictures is taking Twisters out for a spin. A behind-the-scenes video, which features stars Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick), Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People), and Oscar-nominated director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), shows a new look at the "adrenaline-pumping, seat-gripping, big-screen thrill ride" follow-up to Jan de Bont's Twister. 

The Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt-starring 1996 disaster movie — about two storm chasers who race against the dark side of Mother Nature to launch a revolutionary measuring device from inside the eye of a tornado — gets a sequel in the quasi-reboot Twisters, about two opposing storm chasers who race against the dark side of Mother Nature to test a new weather tracking system during a "once-in-a-generation" tornado outbreak in Oklahoma.

"The original Twister, when it came out, it meant a great deal to me," Chung says in the video, below. "Because I was watching a film that took place around where I grew up." The Mandalorian director was raised on a farm "just outside Westville, Oklahoma, and that terrain, that landscape, is a part of me." 

Set and shot in Oklahoma, the Sooner State is "such a character in the movie," says Powell. The Anyone But You actor explained that Twisters is "all about home, and it's all about this mutual love of the way everyone looks up at the sky with reverence and awe."

And like the first Twister movie, which was famously battered by unpredictable weather, the Twisters production "kept having to shut down for actual weather," Edgar-Jones recalled. And like its predecessor, the new movie features real-life storm chasers and even consulted many of the same consultants who worked on the 1996 original. "We are in the mecca for tornadoes," Powell added, "so to have crew members literally leave set and go to storm chase is a really unique thing."

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In Twisters, Edgar-Jones plays Kate Carter, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew — the more dangerous the better. ("If you feel it," Tyler's mantra goes, "chase it!")

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As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed — and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives. Joining Edgar-Jones, Powell, and Ramos are Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Nik Dodani (Atypical) and Golden Globe winner Maura Tierney (Beautiful Boy).

Twisters touches down in theaters on July 19th.

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