Exclusive Twisters Super Bowl trailer breakdown: The cast and director on sequel with 'loads of nods' to original

We may not have cows, Julia, but we've got twins.

On Sunday, Super Bowl viewers were treated to the first trailer of director Lee Isaac Chung's upcoming standalone sequel to 1996's Twister. The heart-pounding tease includes many elements reminiscent of the Helen Hunt-Bill Paxton blockbuster: two seemingly dueling groups of storm chasers, some deadly and massive tornadoes wreaking havoc on Oklahoma, and a scrappy team member excited to shout out a phenomenon developing in front of them: "WE GOT TWINS. TWINS!!!!" (Fans of the original — or tornado climatology in general — may refer to them as "sisters.")

Now, Chung (Minari) and his stars Glen Powell (Anyone But You, Top Gun: Maverick) and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing, Normal People) break down the trailer (watch above), and what to expect from their action adventure, exclusively for EW.

"This is honestly surreal for me. I never would have imagined," Chung says of having a trailer playing during the Super Bowl. And the Academy Award-nominated director knew the stakes were high: "When the first Twister was released, I remember just being blown away by the trailer. I remember feeling how realistic that tornado looked. I'd never seen anything like that. I still remember that trailer, and I know that with this one, we need to try to top it."

And Chung isn't alone in his reverence for the original. Edgar-Jones says she grew up "a huge fan" of Twister, while Powell describes the film as "revolutionary."

"If you would've told me that I would get to be in a Twister movie when I grew up, I'd say to myself, 'You're on the right track,'" he says. "It's as cool as it gets."

"What was essential to me was that it always felt like in that first movie, which didn't necessarily feel like a disaster movie," Chung says of what he considered essential to make his new movie feel related to Twister. "To me, it felt like an adventure movie, and I always loved how that movie inspired a generation of meteorologists and people who were interested in science and weather just because it made that study feel like it was an adventure. That's something that I wanted to retain with this one."

Edgar-Jones promises "loads of nods to the original," and was thrilled to work with many of the same consultants who served on the 1996 film and would share stories of shooting with that all-star cast. But she also believes Twisters "really feels like a new chapter in a really brilliant way. There's new technology, there's new ways to understand these crazy weather systems and tornadoes — so we're bringing it up to date with what the state of the world is now."

Chung embraced the visual effects improvements that have come in the past 28 years as well. ("We need to show that, 'Hey, this is a new ball game,'" he says.) But the director — who grew up in Arkansas — also wanted to ground the film by filming in Oklahoma during tornado season and creating as many practical effects as possible for the cast to act against, at times literally turning jet engines onto his stars.

"I sort of read the scenes and then forgot that actually when we were doing them, what it would be like to be pelted with rain and chunks of ice and hail and wind," says Edgar-Jones. "But it was so hot when we were filming last summer that it was all genuinely steaming off of us. Every time they doused us with water, they had to keep doing it because we dried so quickly. That I was actually grateful for. But when we did reshoots in December, that was less enjoyable...," she concludes with a laugh.

"When you're in the outskirts of Oklahoma getting wind and hay and water and dirt and having Main Street blown across at you, it sure doesn't feel like there's a lot of CGI in the movie," adds Powell, who commends Chung for maintaining a balance between VFX spectacle and character-driven drama. "Lee Isaac Chung is one of the best filmmakers to really guide the emotional storyline of this movie and the way that he's adapted to the scale of this without losing any of that emotion, I think it's incredibly impressive."

Part of upping that scale from Chung's previous work like Minari is an expansive cast, which includes Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Daryl McCormack, Maura Tierney, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, Nik Dodani, David Corenswet, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O'Brian, just to name a few.

"When you're out there hanging out with real chasers, you realize that they come from all different places, all different backgrounds," says Chung, "so I wanted to fill this film with people who come from all different walks of life. I knew that I wanted audiences to chase tornadoes with this movie, so who are the people who they'd want to chase a storm with? That was kind of the measure that I was using a lot in the way that we cast, but also the way that these characters were shaped and written."

At the center of The Revenant and The Boys in the Boat screenwriter Mark L. Smith's script is Powell's Tyler Owens, who the actor says calls himself "the Tornado Wrangler."

"'If you feel it, chase it' is his tagline," says Powell. "When there's something big that everyone else is running away from, Tyler's the guy that runs towards it. It was just a blast of a character."

The trailer sets Tyler up as an adversary of sorts who comes around to work with Edgar-Jones' Kate, whom the actress says has an "incredible arc. I love her fierceness and her depth."

But just because they are at the center of the trailer doesn't mean Tyler and Kate make it to the end. The trailer showcases multiple characters being swept away by tornadoes, and Powell is quick to point out that the "incredible ensemble" is packed with "amazing actors who have been the lead of their own movies."

"I wouldn't say that this movie's like a normal movie in the way that you know who's going to end up in a tornado and who's going to end up on the ground, because everybody's a star in their own right," says the actor. "The fact that Lee Isaac Chung was able to bring this group of people together, I think, is really going to keep the audience on the edge of their seat to see who makes it to the end."

Twisters spins into theaters July 19.

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