Daisy Edgar-Jones has spent much of the past two years talking about wind, and it turns out the wind has left a lasting mark on her. The British actress, who leads the ensemble of the 2024 disaster thriller "Twisters," said in a new interview that the punishing conditions of the shoot appear to have cost her some hearing in one ear - a revelation that has quickly become one of the more unusual on-set stories to emerge from a summer blockbuster.
"I think I'm slightly deaf in one ear," Edgar-Jones said, describing the aftermath of weeks spent filming inside artificially generated gales and debris. She framed the damage as a possible long-term souvenir of a physically relentless production, one in which cast members were repeatedly placed at the center of simulated tornadoes rather than protected from them.
The admission lands with a certain irony. "Twisters" is, after all, a film about people who chase the very weather that most of us flee, and the actress at its center appears to have absorbed a small piece of that premise in real life.
A Physically Taxing Shoot Built on Real Wind
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, "Twisters" arrived in theaters on July 10, 2024, with a runtime of 123 minutes and a premise engineered for scale. The film follows former storm chaser Kate Carter, played by Edgar-Jones, whose path collides with that of Tyler Owens, a reckless social-media storm-chasing celebrity portrayed by Glen Powell. As storm season intensifies, the two and their rival teams are repeatedly caught in the paths of converging systems over central Oklahoma.
Much of that chaos was manufactured on set, and Chung's production leaned heavily on practical effects - enormous fan rigs, airborne debris and water cannons - to give performers something real to react to. The approach has been widely credited with lending the film a tactile quality that purely digital weather rarely achieves. It also meant that actors spent long stretches standing in conditions designed to feel genuinely hostile.
Edgar-Jones's comments suggest that the line between performance and physical toll was thinner than audiences might assume. Hearing protection is standard practice on effects-heavy sets, but sustained exposure to high-volume wind machines, simulated impacts and loud practical rigs can still take a cumulative toll over a months-long shoot.
Not the First Time a Role Has Left a Mark
It is hardly unprecedented for performers to carry away minor injuries or lingering physical quirks from demanding productions. What makes Edgar-Jones's case notable is the mundanity of the symptom: not a dramatic on-set accident, but a gradual, possibly permanent change she only fully registered afterward. She described the effect casually, without suggesting she regrets the work or that the production was unsafe.
Representatives for the actress and for the film's studio did not immediately respond to requests for clarification about the extent of the hearing loss or whether it has been medically evaluated. USA Film News has not independently verified the condition.
The disclosure also adds a fresh wrinkle to the conversation around how much physical punishment audiences implicitly expect from stars in the modern action-thriller space. "Twisters" was sold on immersion - on the promise that viewers would feel the storm - and Edgar-Jones's experience underscores that the people on screen were not merely pretending to stand in the middle of it.
A Cast Built Around the Spectacle
Edgar-Jones anchors a deep ensemble that includes Anthony Ramos as Javi, Brandon Perea as Boone, Maura Tierney as Cathy, Harry Hadden-Paton as Ben, Sasha Lane as Lily and Daryl McCormack as Jeb. The film's mix of action and thriller beats, released in English by a Hollywood studio, positioned it as one of the season's broader tentpoles, and it holds a TMDb rating of 6.754 out of 10.
For Edgar-Jones, the role of Kate marked one of her largest studio assignments to date, following breakout work in television and smaller films. That she emerged from it with a possible hearing issue is the kind of detail that tends to travel further than any press note - a reminder that the spectacle audiences pay for is, for the performers, a job performed in real air, real noise and real wind.
Whether the deafness proves temporary or permanent, Edgar-Jones's remark has already done something the film's marketing could not: it has made the artificial storm feel unmistakably real.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
