‘Twisters’ star Anthony Ramos on Steven Spielberg’s accent advice

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Anthony Ramos is no stranger to giant, CGI-filled productions, but that’s not what excited him about working on the upcoming blockbuster Twisters.

“It was a director,” the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts star tells Entertainment Weekly about why he signed on for a followup to the 1996 Helen Hunt-Bill Paxton tornado movie.

Academy Award-nominated Minari director Lee Issac Chung “is a guy that directs these really niche, smaller, beautiful films,” Ramos describes. “And here he is doing this massive movie. I knew he was going to bring the heart and soul to it.”

Twisters is a “standalone sequel,” meaning it exists in the same world as the original (the Helen Hunt character’s Dorothy devices are visible in the trailer), but none of the characters in the new film will have direct ties to the first movie. That meant the Twisters team had a blank canvas to play with. Starting with a script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, The Boys in the Boat), Ramos says he worked with Chung to flesh out his character, Javi, who has known the film’s lead, Kate (Daisy Edgar Jones), since they studied together at Oklahoma University.

“They used to chase together. You’ll see in the beginning of the movie, there’s a pretty significant storm, and the trauma of that affects them both in different ways,” Ramos explains. “That trauma causes Kate to move away and kind distance herself. And, on the opposite side, Javi is like, ‘Yo, I need to dedicate my life to creating the most advanced technology possible, to be able to decipher when these things are going to happen, how they happen, what causes them.'”

Ramos originally envisioned Javi would have a Southern accent, “but then I heard Steven [Spielberg] was like, ‘No, I want him to do it in his dialect,” the actor says of the legendary filmmaker, who has served as an EP on both Twister movies. “It was a little surprising to me,” Ramos admits, “but it was really cool, to me, because I’ve never heard someone who speaks in my vernacular — especially this New York, Northeast, Latino dialect that I have — in a movie of this size, in a place like Oklahoma. It makes me feel it’s possible for a kid from the hood to go to a school like OU, study meteorology, be this brilliant meteorologist and storm chaser. This is something that a kid like me could do. I thought that that was really cool.”

Twisters also stars Glen Powell, Maura Tierney, Tunde Adebimpe, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, Katy O’Brian, and more. And while Ramos remains appreciative of the heart Chung instills in the film, he also promises “wild” action sequences that they filmed as practical as they could while shooting in Oklahoma last year.

“It’s insane, bro,” Ramos teases. “Between the amazing crew and this cast, it all made the experience as real as possible. It was intense. I can’t wait for people to sit in a theater and experience it.”

Twisters touches down in theaters July 17.

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