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Anthony Ramos, Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones make up the cast of Twisters, whose characters face the challenge of reducing the intensity of tornadoes. After giving convincing performances playing a group of storm chasers who knew their stuff about cyclones, you’d think all of the film’s actors had science backgrounds. Well, Ramos revealed a super sneaky trick that the summer disaster flick used to make him look really good at science.
It must be a lot of hard work to be able to portray a person of science without a background in the field. When you think about characters from the best sci-fi movies of all time and movies based on true scientific stories, like Doc Brown, Dr. Grant, Dr. Arroway and J. Robert Oppenheimer, stars have to remember all of these scientific terms from their scripts and get a good grasp of the material to be in character. Anthony Ramos’ super clever trick done in Twisters was told on BBC Radio 1 that really made him look like he knew his science:
There was something really cool with the special effects on that one, where the team they hired had this magnet underneath the glass –I probably shouldn’t be giving this away but I am — to make sure that when I stirred the water that it would [spin] and stay long enough for them to get a close up on it where it would look like a tornado inside.
That’s actually really cool that a practical special effect like a magnet was able to spin water in a cup as long as it did. Anthony Ramos and Glen Powell may have jokingly thought that they signed up for a CGI movie with Twisters. While the giant tornadoes in the summer movie were computer-generated, little did they know what an intense shooting experience it would be.
For example, Glen Powell mentioned “a giant jet engine” blown in his face as pieces of debris were getting thrown at them. After these actors spent plenty of the movie staring into something that’s not there, practical effects like real wind, water and debris definitely create the illusion that they’re in tornado-driven Oklahoma.
Getting to play the role of stormchaser Javi seemed like a real honor for Anthony Ramos. While the In the Heights actor was originally going to don a Southern accent to play an Oklahoma resident, he received a note from Twisters’ executive producer Steven Spielberg to use his native New York-Latino accent. Ramos seemed touched by the note and felt more seen to have a brilliant meteorology student be someone of Latino descent. By bringing together a diverse cast for his movie, Lee Isaac Chung allowed actors of different races and nationalities to play scientists and stormwranglers that knew their stuff, making the characters more relatable to wide audiences.
To make Anthony Ramos look like he knows a thing or two about science in Twisters, a super sneaky practical effect had a magnet make a spinning twister in a cup stay in position for a long time. Now, that’s movie magic and science of its own kind. You can see Ramos master this practical effect and more in the 2024 movie release in theaters now, with its 4DX return release date set on August 30th.