Glen Powell Reveals the Bill Paxton Acting Trick He Used in ‘Twisters’

Glen Powell is sharing how he’s kept Bill Paxton’s memory alive throughout his career thus far.

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While appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the Twisters star reflected on working with the late actor on a film years ago.

“I shot this movie called Red Wing years and years ago and Bill and I became really close on that movie,” Powell said. He recalled Paxton being “so passionate about the weather” especially since starring in Twister and would continue the tradition of giving weather reports like his Twister character did.

Prior to starring in Hidden Figures , Powell said Paxton even provided “a lot of my research from his Apollo 13 days.” There was also an acting trick, Powell said, that Paxton taught him that he’s used in his career so far.

He shared, “As an actor, sometimes you have to shoot outdoors and you’re kind of squinting and whatnot and he taught me this trick that if you close your eyes and you look up at the sun, it warms your eyes up to the sun and you can open your eyes. So while we were shooting Twisters , I was shooting outdoors the whole time so I’d used that trick my entire career since meeting Bill. And on Twisters I really felt like every time I closed my eyes, I got to think of Bill which was great.”

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Powell stars in the refreshed Twisters film, which offers a current-day chapter of the 1996 blockbuster Twister , starring Paxton and Helen Hunt. Powell stars alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos.

In Twisters , Edgar-Jones stars as former storm chaser Kate Cooper, who studies storm patterns on screens after being haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years. After being lured back to chase storms on the open plains by her friend, Javi (Ramos), to test a new tracking system, they cross paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), a social-media star who posts his storm-chasing adventures online. They then are left to fight for their lives as the storm season intensifies.

Paxton died of a stroke in 2017 following complications during heart surgery.

Paxton’s son James Paxton makes a cameo in the new Twisters film to honor his father. “He wanted to be a part of a sequel,” the younger Paxton told The Hollywood Reporter. “He saw how special this franchise is and can be just in terms of making something eventful for people to go see in the theaters, something topical and important as well but also fun; a real return to classic blockbuster.”

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