Helen Hunt Recalls 'Immediately' Having Chemistry with Bill Paxton While FilmingTwister

Mar. 15, 2025

Helen Hunt at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021.Photo:Dia Dipasupil/Getty

Dia Dipasupil/Getty

The actress, 61, appeared at a special screening of the 1996 hit disaster film atRhode Island Comic Conon Friday, Nov. 1. In a pre-screening Q&A, theMad About Youstar reminisced about her special on-screen chemistry with costarBill Paxton, who died due to complicationsfrom surgeryin 2017 at the age of 61.

“There’s this old trope that is true,” she went on to say, “Sometimes you have chemistry with someone and you love everything they say and you want to jump in their arms, and other times they drive you crazy — and that’s another kind of chemistry.”

“So I think we both realized that was what was asked of us in this,” she concluded.

Bill Paxton (left) and Helen Hunt in the 1996 movie ‘Twister.'.Amblin/Universal/Warners/Kobal/Shutterstock (5882659n)

Amblin/Universal/Warners/Kobal/Shutterstock (5882659n)

Hunt went on to praise herTwistercostar Jami Gertz, who played Hunt’s romantic rival of sorts — for contributing to her chemistry with Paxton.

“She’s playing someone who’s such a drag,” Hunt said. “And is asking all the boring questions and doesn’t want to get her suit dirty. Her doing that makes me look cool, so, you know, I owe it — a lot of it — to her.”

Hunt also revealed that she and Gertz were responsible for ensuring that their dynamic never felt “catty,” despite playing two women in love with the same man.

“There’s very few things I take credit for in this movie, because it is so much bigger than me,” Hunt said. “ButthatI will take some credit for, because there were some things in the script where I’m a little catty with her, she is with me, and we looked at each other and said, ‘I don’t want to see it.’ "

“It was the two of us who went, ‘That’s not the way to get an audience to want to watch these two women,’ " she recalled.

Helen Hunt in the 1996 film ‘Twister.'.Everett

Everett

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Twisters, a standalone sequel starringDaisy Edgar-Jones,Glen Powell,Kiernan Shipka,Anthony Ramosand more, premiered in theaters on July 19. During its development, Hunt hadpitched and intended to direct a sequelto the original, co-writing a script withDaveed Diggsand Rafael Casal.

“I tried to get it made,” she said onWatch What Happens Live with Andy Cohenin 2021. But studios “wouldn’t do it,” she said, adding that “it would have been so cool.”

Of filming tornadoes back in the days when computer-generated effects weren’t as advanced as now, Hunt toldEntertainment Weeklyin July that theTwisterteam “just pummeled the s— out of us, and it looks amazing… So much of acting now is you’re looking at a piece of tape, or you’re looking at a green screen.” What she and her costars were reacting to, she added, “was really happening. And while it made it messier, it made it easier to act.”

Rhode Island Comic Con runs Nov. 1-3 in Providence, Rhode Island.

source: people.com