Glen Powell wasn’t supposed to be showing off his body in “Twisters,” but then came the rain, as director Lee Isaac Chung decided at the last minute that Powell should be seen in the natural disaster movie in a wet white T-shirt.
“That was Isaac’s idea,” Powell told me Thursday at the film’s Los Angeles premiere. “I did have a jacket in that scene. He said, ‘I think we’re going to toss the jacket out.’ I was like, ‘Cool.’ And he goes, ‘Also, there’s going to be a rain machine.’ I was like, ‘OK.’ But then I was like, ‘Wait a minute.’”
The hunky moment in the movie — a sequel to the classic tornado disaster action thriller “Twister” — was met with applause and cheers during the premiere screening.
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Powell insists he didn’t do any extra push-ups before shooting the shot. “Not enough,” he said, laughing.
Isaac recalled, “I thought it would be impressionistic. When we started rolling then I realized, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve done.’ And everybody’s telling me to keep rolling. I aim to please.”
But not everything was body, body, body on set. The cast and crew faced disastrous real-life weather conditions while filming in Oklahoma. Ironically, one of their sets that was ready to be demolished during one of the tornado sequences had to be rebuilt after a real windstorm destroyed it. “We did a big set in a farmers market and we had a wild storm,” Daisy Edgar-Jones remembered. “We were watching from the windows like, ‘Oh, no!’”
Chung wished he could have shot the real storm, but said, “As a filmmaker I definitely asked the question, ‘Can we roll on this?’ But the answers was, ‘No, for safety reasons.’ … But we took pictures, and that was a reference for us.”
Edgar-Jones recently told Variety’s Ellise Shafer that she and her “Normal People” co-star Paul Mescal bonded over her training for “Twisters” and his for “Gladiator 2.” I had to ask Edgar-Jones what she thought of the just-released “Gladiator” trailer. “Wow, he was far more ripped than I was,” she said of Mescal. “It’s so cool. I am so excited for him. I cannot wait to see it… He worked so hard on it.”
“Twisters” hits theaters July 19.
See photos from the premiere below.
