'We were out there in the middle of tornado season'

'Twisters' star Anthony Ramos, who rose to fame in the original 'Hamilton' cast, tells Louis Chilton why making a film about tornados during extreme weather was 'crazy'

- Louis Chilton

Anthony Ramos leans over to show me what’s on his phone screen: the bird’s eye Google Maps outline of Stoke-subHamdon in Somerset. “Look at this shit,” he says, eagerly. It is, explains the star of Broadway’s Hamilton, his go-to place in the UK, somewhere he used to visit with his ex. There’s something more than a bit incongruous about imagining Ramos putting his feet up in a sleepy West Country village with a population of just 1,358. Just a year ago, he was the face of a $200m blockbuster (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts); now he’s back in another one, Twisters.

Sitting next to me in the suite of an upmarket London hotel, Ramos looks every bit the modern movie star. He wears a sharp black jacket, a chain around his neck and his hair arrestingly slicked; his distinctive freckles are perhaps the only part of him that disobey a perfect symmetry. It is hard, perhaps, to pin down exactly what Ramos’s place in the industry is going to be, what cinematic nook he will make his own. In another universe, Ramos’s part in the 2021 New York-set rap musical In the Heights would have been a star-making turn. As plucky, selfmade sweetheart Usnavi, Ramos seemed to ooze charm. But a screen musical is a hard sell at the best of times, and a combination of Covid and a day-and-date streaming release saw In the Heights fail to, well, reach them.

“Even at that time, the only movies really crushing were Fast and Furious, or Marvel,” Ramos says. “But I’m really proud of In The Heights. Obviously on the box office side, it didn’t do what everyone had hoped for. But when people tell me they love that film, and have watched it [repeatedly], I’m like, no – we won. We won.”