Although the upcoming sequel to 1996’s Twister is missing some major names from the original, one cameo had a special significance to original leading man Bill Paxton.
The late Golden Globe nominee’s son James Paxton said his experience on the set of the upcoming sequel Twisters, which premieres July 19, was “an emotional thing” after his father died at age 61 back in 2017.
“It took me a little bit of time to process it, just given the context of my dad and his significance in the original and him not being here,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly. “It’s an emotional thing. It wasn’t something that I could really decide immediately, It took a little time just to process it, just the magnitude of it.”
James said he “wanted to be a conduit” for his dad’s spirit on set “and cheer everyone in this production on to success because I know he would be. I wanted to do something that really honors his presence in this new chapter and really do something for him. And I realized there’s a lot of amazing people involved in this that I would love to get to know. And so it ended up feeling like the right thing to do, to be representative of Dad there.”
The Eyewitness actor noted that despite his last name, he still “had to read” for the role and ultimately “made peace” with not landing the audition after it took a while to hear back. He previously played an alternate version of his father’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. character John Garrett in 2020.
Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in Twister 1996. (Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection)
“It’s a tricky thing, because my dad was my best friend, and so I never shy away from talking about him and celebrating him,” he told EW. “But also, when you’re pursuing the same thing, you want to try to set yourself apart. I always love homaging him in things like Twisters, and did it in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but I know that the projects he was also really proud of were the ones that I was able to do that had nothing to do with him.
“He’s been gone for most of my career, unfortunately. But he got to see Eyewitness, and he told me, ‘You’ve got a real ticket to ride,’ which was his way of saying, ‘You got a ticket to the big leagues; you can go play now, but you got to take it seriously and study and buckle down.’ And so now I feel closest to him when I’m working on sets. I just think back on all of the amazing work that he got to do, and that’s where I really feel him. I mean, I feel him all the time, but especially then. I kind of had a moment on the Twisters set where I walked off, and I went, ‘God, can you believe this?’ And I was talking to myself, but also to him, in just a little private moment that I had,” said James.
After Bill Paxton died of a stroke in 2017, following open-heart surgery, his family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the surgeon who operated on him in 2022.