Twister Star Helen Hunt Reveals Changes Made to the Women’s Characters

Helen Hunt, the Academy Award-winning actor who gives life to tornado chaser Jo Harding in Twister, says that her original character was slightly different from what we saw in the final cut. Along with Jami Gertz, her co-star in the movie who plays Bill Paxton’s love interest, and of course, her “rival” in terms of fighting over Bill Harding, Hunt decided some changes had to be made to their characters because they didn’t want the audience to think they were banal and “catty.”

In the original film, Bill Harding arrives in Oklahoma to serve Jo some divorce papers. His new girlfriend, Melissa, comes along, and she’s clearly not used to a country lifestyle. Jo is hesitant to accept the papers because she still has feelings for him, but it’s not her attitude that convinces Bill to go back to his old gig as a tornado chaser. It’s an epidemic of tornadoes that will allow Jo’s crew to test their new equipment. Bill jumps on board, and Melissa is dragged along.

The great Helen Hunt spoke to People about her participation in Twister, and she reminisced about performing alongside Paxton in the film: “I think we immediately had the chemistry. There’s this old trope that is true. 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.”

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In the same conversation, Hunt spoke about some features in Jo and Melissa’s characters that she and Gertz didn’t click with. Praising the work of the female co-star, Hunt remembers how they instantly agreed that there were some changes that had to be made in order to make their characters more appealing, at least to them. Hunt says:

“She’s playing someone who’s such a drag. 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.

There’s very few things I take credit for in this movie, because it is so much bigger than me. 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.’”

Why Didn’t Helen Hunt Return in 2024’s Twisters?

Bill Paxton passed away in 2017, so his character obviously wasn’t set to return in the 2014 sequel, Twisters. However, director Lee Isaac Chung decided no other character from the original 1996 film had to return to the franchise in what’s already been labeled as a standalone sequel. The original entry by Jan de Bont had a plethora of secondary characters that, yes, didn’t have enough substance to their storylines to make a return. But Jo Harding? Wouldn’t her return have been memorable?

Chung decided the new film had to feature entirely new characters. One actor, April Warren, is the single performer to appear in both films but she does soi in lesser characters that people didn’t notice. The director of the new film addressed his decision not to include Jo and said this:

“I just felt like that is not what I want to see Jo Harding doing years from now. Right after seeing that first film, I imagined, ‘What is Jo Harding up to now?’ She’s out there chasing storm[s], not at the farm complaining that her daughter’s not calling her. And so that was really the basis of why, ‘OK, it’s got to be someone else.’”