Helen Hunt Reveals She Almost Quit Twister Weeks Before Filming Due to Knee Injury: Can I 'Pull This Off?'

Filming Twister was even harder than it looked for Helen Hunt.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly ahead of the premiere of the standalone sequel Twisters, the actress recalled how she "injured [her] knee right before" they began production on the original 1996 disaster flick, which costarred the late Bill Paxton.

"A week or two before, I remember sitting in Oklahoma with ice on my knee and calling my agent and going, 'Am I going to be able to pull this off?' " said Hunt, 61. "So, for me, it was just like 'Run anyway' because I had no other choice."

Of the "very physical" movie, she added, "It's all for the best that there wasn't the technology to do it all on your laptop. Instead, they just pummeled the s--- out of us, and it looks amazing."

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Hunt told EW that "so much of acting now is you're looking at a piece of tape, or you're looking at a green screen, or you're looking at dots on someone's face, and someone has to tell you, 'Well, what's going to be here later is this thing's going to come around the corner.' "

"A lot of what we reacted to was really happening," the Oscar and four-time Emmy winner explained of her work on Twister. "And while it made it messier, it made it easier to act."

Director Jan de Bont told the outlet he "filmed the actors at the same time, the same moment" as the action, "so they react to the real thing."

"They don't react to, 'And now fall down ...' It doesn't work. This was all real," added the director, 80.

Twister became a hit after its premiere, earning over $494 million at the worldwide box office. Helmed by Speed director de Bont, the film was executive produced by Steven Spielberg and written by late Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton.

The upcoming follow-up, Twisters, has been described as a standalone sequel and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Kiernan Shipka, Anthony Ramos and more.

Back in a December 2023 interview with Vogue, Powell said Twisters is "definitely not a reboot" and added, "We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one. It’s a completely original story.”

The Anyone But You actor, 35, also told the magazine he believes the general theme of the new film will appeal to audiences.

“When I was working on [Top Gun: Maverick], [Tom] Cruise brought up a really interesting thing, where he’s like, ‘If you want to make movies of a certain size and scope and scale, you have to figure out what can connect with everyone around the world in every territory,’ “ Powell said. 

He continued, “And humans-versus-weather is a very universal idea, how powerless we really are in the face of these cataclysmic forces.”

Twister is currently streaming on Max. Twisters is in theaters July 19.