Glen Powell: 'Twisters' celebrates thrill of the chase

NEW YORK, July 19 (UPI) -- Glen Powell says his character, Tyler -- described in Twisters as a "hillbilly with a YouTube channel" -- shares rival Kate's passion, but has his own reason for and style of storm-chasing.

Opening in theaters Friday, Twisters is set in Oklahoma and is billed by Universal Pictures as "a current-day chapter of the 1996 blockbuster, Twister, " as opposed to a sequel or remake.

It was helmed by Minari writer-director Lee Isaac.

Daisy Edgar-Jones ( Where the Crawdads Sing) plays scientist Kate and Anthony Ramos ( In the Heights ) plays Javier, the well-funded colleague who lures her back into the field five years after her miscalculation gets several of their friends killed by a tornado.

"This is Kate's story. She was someone who really experienced this tragic thing as a child. She used to love storm-chasing," 35-year-old Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man star Powell told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.

"She used to love the weather," Powell said of Kate. "That's when she felt like she was most at home, and my role in this story is to just remind her about why the weather is fun, why chasing something that gives you that much excitement and pleasure is very worthy."

Edgar-Jones, 26, said that after initially trying to give the confident, charming Tyler the brush-off, Kate comes to respect his scientific acumen and develop a "wonderful rapport" with him.

"Kate, at the beginning of the film, has so much of Tyler's essence. She's just so full of joy and fun and adrenaline, loves the kind of chase," Edgar-Jones said of what Kate was like before her friends died.

"When she first meets Tyler, she thinks of him as somebody who's sort of careless and doesn't respect the sort of force and the strength and how dangerous these things can be," she added.

"Through their shared understanding and their time spent together, they realize they're far more alike than different. He kind of reintroduces her to the person she once was."

Powell said he believes that's why a scene in which the two call a truce and attend a rodeo together is crucial to the evolution of their characters' relationship.

"I call her 'city girl,' thinking that she's this outsider," he noted, adding that after watching how she instinctively reads the wind and the sky, he knows she is not just another urban academic.

She is actually an outdoor girl who appreciates the same things he does.

"I always looked at Kate like she is her own tornado, one that Tyler was just trying to understand," Powell said.

"That's what makes that sort of push-and-pull a competitive element for the two of them. It's sort of two people that were raised in this [rural] place. It's a battle of wits. It's a battle of instincts, and it infuses this movie with a lot of life and fun."

Most of the film follows two storm-chasing teams -- Kate's, which is huge and high-tech with serious members wearing matching gear and driving expensive cars, and Tyler's, which is a ragtag group of cowboy scientists piloting vehicles and drones held together with duct tape.

"That's a really good sort of contrast because chasing requires both science and your [personal] knowledge," Powell said.

The actor said real-life storm-chasers whom he and Edgar-Jones met during the making of the movie told them they improvise a lot of their equipment and systems because they simply don't exist otherwise.

"When we first went to the National Weather [Service] Center, [someone] showed us the truck and I asked, 'Where do you get this gear that's all over your truck?' and the answer was, 'I built it,'" Powell said.

"So much of this is reading the weather. And what's so fun is that if your gear breaks down in the middle of a storm, there's no service to call to fix these things," he added. "You have to be so handy."

Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cary Elwes headlined the original blockbuster, which was set in Kansas.

Paxton died in 2017 at age 61, but Twisters pays tribute to him by casting his son, James, in a cameo role.

"It was really special. James is wonderful and such a lovely person and such a brilliant actor, and he had great stories," Edgar-Jones said.

In another serendipitous twist, Bill and James starred in Powell's first big movie, 2001's Spy Kids .

"I wasn't in a scene with them, but we all share that same experience, which was really incredible. That movie changed my life and I got to work with Bill on a movie called Red Wing years and years ago and we kept in touch," Powell said.

"He was just such a great spirit, such a kind guy. We really got to know each other well," he added. "You could tell that Twister was one of those movies he was so proud of. He was so proud of the community around it. He looked at the sky differently afterward."