Helen Hunt Recalls 'Immediately' Having Chemistry with Bill Paxton While Filming Twister

Helen Hunt is getting swept away by memories of Twister. 

The actress, 61, appeared at a special screening of the 1996 hit disaster film at Rhode Island Comic Con on Friday, Nov. 1. In a pre-screening Q&A, the Mad About You star reminisced about her special on-screen chemistry with costar Bill Paxton, who died due to complications from surgery in 2017 at the age of 61.

"I think we immediately had the chemistry," she told the audience, comparing their dynamic to that of stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the classic 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby.

"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.

Hunt went on to praise her Twister costar 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. "But that I 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.

Written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin and executive produced by tornado aficionado Steven Spielberg, Twister earned over $494 million at the worldwide box office. It also stars Gertz, Cary Elwes, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

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Twisters, a standalone sequel starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Kiernan Shipka, Anthony Ramos and more, premiered in theaters on July 19. During its development, Hunt had pitched and intended to direct a sequel to the original, co-writing a script with Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. 

"I tried to get it made," she said on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in 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 told Entertainment Weekly in July that theTwister team “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.