‘It was brutal’: Twisters star reveals bizarre ritual actors had to perform while filming

Twisters actor Anthony Ramos has revealed he and his co-stars were required to suck on ice cubes before shooting scenes.

Ramos stars opposite Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones in director Lee Isaac Chung’s standalone sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 action-adventure Twister.

In a new video interview for Entertainment Weekly , Ramos said: “There’s all that big physical stuff, but then there’s the stuff where it’s like super cold outside and we’re shooting a scene for the summer in the winter now – when we came back after the [actors’ and writers’] strike – and they’re like, ‘Can you just suck on these ice cubes so we can stop from the [condensation] coming out from when you guys speak?’”

Powell jumped in, adding: “Put more cold on you to stop steam, so it sells summer.”

“So we’re like this before a scene,” Ramos continued, mimicking the act of sucking on ice and spitting it out, “and then they’re like, ‘Action,’ and we’re in it, and we’re freezing, but they’re looking to see if there’s steam coming out of our mouths and they’re like. ‘Yeah we’re gonna have to paint that out’ or ‘we can’t use that.’

“It was brutal,” he recalled.

Released nearly 30 years after the original Twister movie, Twisters follows Kate Cooper (Edgar-Jones) a former tornado wrangler lured back to the dangerous activity to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. After Kate crosses paths with a charming yet wreckless social media star (Powell), the two find themselves in the fight for their lives as the storms intensify.

Twisters has been a hit with critics. It’s currently rated higher, at 77 per cent, than its predecessor’s 67 per cent on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

The original movie featured Helen Hunt as Dr Jo Harding, a university professor who goes out with a team of underfunded students to prepare a ground-breaking tornado data-gathering device conceived by her estranged husband, Bill (Bill Paxton). However, when Harding’s privately funded rival Dr Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) steals their idea to build his own, Bill rejoins Harding for one last mission. Both films are set in the notoriously twister-prone state of Oklahoma.

The Independent ’s Clarisse Loughrey applauded the sequel for being a “ sharply edited, comfortingly old-school affair,” in her four-star review.

“The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old-school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower,” she wrote. “No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.”

Twisters is out now in theaters.