Twisters: Glen Powell brought his own tornado experience to the movie

I don’t live in tornado country, so I’ve never experienced one, but they seem pretty frightening. However, Twisters star Glen Powell does have a history with tornados, and he told Total Film that he was able to bring that experience to his role.

“It’s actually something I got to incorporate a little bit into the movie,” Powell said. “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.“

Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung is also familiar with tornados, and he told Total Film that one of his earliest memories was living in a trailer home in Arkansas when his parents yelled that there was a tornado on the way. “We didn’t have any storm shelter,” he said. “So we were immediately looking for a place where we could hide it out.“

Whenever I see reports of tornados, hurricanes, or tropical storms wreaking havoc, I start to wonder how people can live in the path of those natural disasters without feeling constantly stressed out. Then I remind myself that I live in a province that’s on fire for more than half the year. I guess we deal with it.

Glen Powell plays storm-chasing superstar Tyler Owens in Twisters and stars alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Kate Cooper, “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) 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. 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.” The film also stars Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Nik Dodani (Atypical), Katy O’Brien (Love Lies Bleeding), and Maura Tierney (Beautiful Boy).

While the sequel doesn’t have a big connection to the original film, Powell has previously said that it’s definitely not a reboot. “We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one,” Powell said. “It’s a completely original story. There are no characters from the original movie back, so it’s not really a continuation. It’s just its own standalone story in the modern-day.” Twisters will hit theaters on July 19th.