Helen Hunt Remembers Her Chemistry With Bill Paxton in ‘Twister’

Helen Hunt is carried away by memories of Twister.

The actress, 61, appeared at a special screening of the hit 1996 disaster film Rhode Island ComicCon on Friday, November 1. In a pre-screening Q&A, the Crazy about you star reminisced about her special on-screen chemistry with costar Bill Paxtonwho died due to complications of an operation in 2017 at the age of 61.

“I think we had instant chemistry,” she told the audience, comparing their dynamic to that of stars Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant in the classic 1938 film Raising baby.

“There’s an old trope that’s true,” she continued, “sometimes you click with someone and you love everything they say and you want to jump into their arms, and other times they drive you crazy — and that’s a different kind of chemistry.”

“So I think we both realized that this is what was being asked of us in this one,” she concluded.

Bill Paxton (left) and Helen Hunt in the 1996 film ‘Twister’.

Amblin/Universal/Warners/Kobal/Shutterstock (5882659n)

Hunt then praised her Twister costar Jami Gertz, who played something of a romantic rival to Hunt — as he contributed to her chemistry with Paxton.

“She plays someone who is so annoying,” Hunt said. ‘And she asks all kinds of boring questions and doesn’t want to get her suit dirty. When I do that, I 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 are very few things I can take credit for in this movie because it’s so much bigger than me,” Hunt said. “But That I’ll take some credit for it, because there were some things in the script where I’m a little bit catty to her, she’s to me, and we looked at each other and said, ‘I don’t want to see it.’ ”

“The two of us said, ‘That’s not the way to get an audience to look at these two women,’” she recalls.

Helen Hunt in the 1996 film ‘Twister’.

Everett

Written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin and executive produced by tornado enthusiast Steven Spielberg, Twister earned over $494 million at the worldwide box office. Gertz also plays Cary ElwesLois Smith, Alan Ruk and the late Philip Seymour Hofman.

Never miss a story – sign up PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up to date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

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

“I tried to get it fixed,” she continued 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.”

On filming tornadoes in the days when computer-generated effects were not as advanced as they are today, Hunt said Entertainment weekly in July that theTwister team “just beat us up, and it looks great…A big part of acting now is you’re looking at a piece of tape, or you’re looking at a green screen.” What she and her co-stars were responding to, she added, “was really happening. And while it made it messier, it made it easier to trade.”

Rhode Island Comic Con runs from November 1 to 3 in Providence, Rhode Island.