Helen Hunt nearly quit ‘Twister’ shortly before filming — here’s why
Helen Hunt dealt with her own storm before “Twister.”
The 61-year-old actress revealed that she almost quit the 1996 disaster film before production began in Oklahoma.
“I injured my knee right before we started,” Hunt told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Wednesday ahead of the sequel’s release.
“And so a week or two before, I remember sitting in Oklahoma with ice on my knee and calling my agent and going, ‘Am I going to be able to pull this off?’ ” Hunt recalled. “So, for me, it was just like ‘Run anyway’ because I had no other choice.”
Ultimately, Hunt played the lead role in “Twister,” which became the second-highest grossing film of 1996.
The movie follows a group of amateur storm chasers trying to deploy a tornado research device during a severe tornado outbreak in Oklahoma.
Hunt — who starred alongside Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck and Philip Seymour Hoffman — said that “Twister” was “a very physical movie.”
“Looking back, it’s all for the best that there wasn’t the technology to do it all on your laptop. Instead, they just pummeled the s–t out of us, and it looks amazing,” the actress continued. “So much of acting now is you’re looking at a piece of tape, or you’re looking at a green screen, or you’re looking at dots on someone’s face, and someone has to tell you, ‘Well, what’s going to be here later is this thing’s going to come around the corner.’ “
“A lot of what we reacted to was really happening. And while it made it messier, it made it easier to act,” she added.
Hunt will not appear in the stand-alone sequel “Twisters” starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Powell, 35, told Vogue in December that “Twisters” is “a completely original story.”
“It’s definitely not a reboot,” he said. “We’re not trying to re-create the story from the first one.”
In 2021, Hunt revealed that she pitched a sequel concept four years prior — but her idea was rejected.
“I tried to get it made,” Hunt said on “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” at the time.
“With Daveed [Diggs] and Rafael [Casal] and me writing it, and all black and brown storm chasers, and they wouldn’t do it. I was going to direct it … We could barely get a meeting, and this is in June of 2020 when it was all about diversity. It would have been so cool.”
Diggs, 42, told Insider in 2023 that the circumstances behind Hunt’s concept not going forward were “shady.”
“All I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen,” he said. “And the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady. But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.”
In the nearly 30 years since the original film spun into theaters, some original cast members have died.
Paxton died in 2017 at age 61, and Hoffman died in 2014 at age 46.
“I think just by who we are, we had chemistry,” Hunt told EW of Paxton. “Not because we were similar but because we were different. And we both could see the potential for what could be really fun about this and how to keep that. It’s a tried and true thing, ‘You drive me crazy, but I’m in love with you.’ But that was really on the page, and we both had a lot of fun trying to bring that to life.”
“I want to say one other thing, though: I think the secret weapon in that duo is that it was a triangle. [Director] Jami Gertz doesn’t get all the glory like Bill and I did. She had to ask all the expositional questions. She had to be the one that wasn’t as cool as me, who you wanted to be with,” she continued. “In some early drafts of the script, they were kind of catty with each other, but we both thought, ‘Boy, is that a mistake,’ and we just never did that. She had the less flashy part, but I think she was part of the secret sauce that made it fun to watch. Maybe more than people realize.”
“Twisters” is in theaters July 19.
