Glen Powell’s pup, Brisket, has been stealing the show as he accompanies his dog dad on his press tour for Twisters, a standalone sequel to the 1996 storm-chasing Twister.
While in Oklahoma shooting the action-adventure now playing in theatres, Powell, 35, got the itch to adopt a dog. After working non-stop on 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, last year’s smash rom-com Anyone But You and the festival favourite Hit Man, the in-demand actor had already been scoping out adoption sites when he came across a picture of Brisket. He was immediately smitten and on a break from shooting one day, he flew up to Los Angeles to adopt the adorable pooch.
“I saw a picture of Brisket and I chased him back to L.A. and brought him to Oklahoma,” Powell says describing their first meeting.
When he arrived on set, Brisket himself became a force to be reckoned with. “Brisket brought pure love in the centre of the storm. He really was a team mascot,” Powell says in a video interview from Oklahoma City alongside his co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing).
But Brisket almost had an entirely different name. “I almost named Brisket, Enid. There’s this town in Oklahoma and I saw a sign and I thought, ‘I’m going to be a dog dad.’”
Powell reckoned that Brisket (who has over 48,000 fans on Instagram and graced the covers of of GQ and EW) was a far cuter name. Having the puppy on the set with him as he filmed the stunt-heavy scenes helped him unwind after long days in front of the camera.
“He’s been a real joy … a real joy,” Powell says. “So I thought it was fitting that he made his debut on the red carpet since he was part of this cast from the beginning.”
Penned by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, The Boys in the Boat) with a story credited to Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick) and Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung in the director’s chair, Twisters casts Powell as Tyler Owens, a self-described “tornado wrangler” who becomes a massive star on YouTube thanks to his outrageous storm-chasing antics. Edgar-Jones plays Kate Carter, a physics whiz who has developed a scientific way to tame tornadoes by hatching a plan to absorb the moisture trapped in their wind funnels.
After a tragedy in the film’s opening scenes sends Kate scurrying off to New York City for a less stressful job tracking weather patterns, she is lured back to her storm-chasing life when an old colleague (Anthony Ramos) convinces her to help him implement a new technique for dealing with devastating storms.
Kate and Tyler link up when a deadly storm of the century threatens to obliterate a small town in Oklahoma. Sparks fly — literally and figuratively.
Directed by Jan de Bont with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton starring as a storm-chasing estranged couple, the first Twister movie in 1996 was a summertime blockbuster.
“I grew up in England, where we don’t have much of anything in the way of treacherous weather besides the occasional thick fog, so Twister was a transporting, exciting, scary thrill ride that captured my imagination,” Edgar-Jones, 26, says of her experience watching the first film.
Raised in Austin, Texas, Powell knows what it was like to live alongside the danger of tornadoes. As a youngster, he can vividly recall how on one trip to visit an aunt in a small town he was forced to seek shelter in a carpet store as a storm raged outside its windows.
The experience of seeing how tornadoes impact people’s lives informed his performance. “I wanted to start out with my character presenting as exactly the guy you think he is, this self-promoting adrenaline junkie,” Powell says. “But then you realize there’s real depth to him. His team of storm chasers … have deep respect for the awesome power of tornadoes and care about the people affected by the destruction they cause.”
Of course, seeing nature at its most destructive was a hallmark of the first film. In one memorable sequence from the original, Jami Gertz’s New York therapist exclaims, “We got cows!” as a heifer goes flying by the vehicle she’s in with Hunt and Paxton.
In the new film, Edgar-Jones points to a new scene she hopes will achieve the same notoriety. “My favourite is when the character Boone (Brandon Perea) sees two tornadoes and he says, ‘Twins? We’ve got twins!’ I think that would be a great meme for anyone who gives birth to twins in the future,” the Golden Globe nominee says chuckling.
Powell, who was joined by his Maverick co-star Tom Cruise at the London premiere of Twisters earlier this month, has watched the film a few times now with moviegoers. He’s still curious which lines from the new sequel will resonate with audiences.
“If Twisters can be the face of dual parenthood that will be amazing,” he smiles, tipping his cap to Edgar-Jones. “It’s one of these movies that really feels like the ultimate summer blockbuster. It’s quotable and the moments are so filmic. I’ll be interested to see what audiences take away after they watch it.”
Even though Twisters features plenty of CGI effects, filming the disaster epic on location in Oklahoma during tornado season meant the crew had to dodge real-life storms interrupting the fake storms on the set of their movie. The irony wasn’t lost on Edgar-Jones or Powell, but it only adds to the veracity of the scares the characters face. They couldn’t storm-chase for real (“because of insurance,” Edgar Jones says), but they still had some hairy moments.
“We had to shut down constantly for weather coming in. We had an entire set blow away one day down the street. Only for them to rebuild it to blow it away again on camera,” Edgar-Jones says as Powell nods. “We had one day of filming where this crazy mesocyclone cloud formed behind us and we had to leave the set because it turned into a tornado … It was wild. We filmed in Oklahoma during storm season so it was a true character on the set, but it was helpful for us to be immersed in this world and experience real weather as we shot a film about real extreme weather.”
Twisters is now playing in theatres.