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In the film, directed by Steven Quale (“Final Destination 5”), the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes in the span of a single day.

Sarah Wayne Callies: Tornado hunter in ‘Into the Storm’

Sarah Wayne Callies, the leading actress of “Into the Storm,” talked to AL DÍA about the film that hit cinemas last week.

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Sarah Wayne Callies, the leading actress of “Into the Storm,” talked to AL DÍA about the film that hit cinemas last week.
The actor, known to most because of the hit TV show “The Walking Dead,” plays single mother Allison Stone, who struggles to balance the needs of her daughter and her career.
“Professionally, she is a professor of climatology and a meteorologist, who is hired to locate a tornado and bring a camera team into the heart of it, to get a shot that’s never been filmed before. And she is also there to do her own research about tornadoes and how they work,” Wayne Callies said. “Personally, she is a single mom and she is torn between achieving a level of professional excellence and being away from her daughter, so she has a sense of guilt that she is always shortchanging her work or shortchanging her daughter.”
The actress, who is used to working long days away from her own family, said she identified with the character, “just like many other working mothers can also relate to it.” 
In the film, directed by Steven Quale (“Final Destination 5”), the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes in the span of a single day. Since storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come, most people seek shelter, while others run towards the vortex, testing how far a storm chaser will go for that once-in-a-lifetime shot.
In 2011 Wayne Callies herself witnessed a natural disaster that was so shocking she suppressed from her memory even while shooting the movie. 
While she was driving from Los Angeles to Atlanta, to go shoot the second season of “The Walking Dead”, the weather changed instantly from a sunny day to torrential rain as she crossed Alabama. Then she heard on the radio that a tornado was about to hit a neighboring county without realizing she was heading directly toward it.
“I called my husband and I told him where I was, and he said ‘you have to get off the road right now.’ I was driving straight into Tuscaloosa, where the tornado was on the ground killing people,” Wayne Callies said. “I pulled off the road and I barely made it in time, waited out the storm and the next morning I was driving and there were these enormous 100-foot tall magnolia trees that were ripped out of the ground.”
That night more than 300 people died in Alabama alone, after the largest multiple tornado vortex in the history of the United States, and affected other states in the South, Midwest and Northeast.
“If I’d kept going, in 10 minutes I would’ve been straight into the middle of it,” said the actor, who had erased all memory of the incident until her husband recently reminded her about it.
After shooting the movie, Wayne Callies worked in a play with an actor from Oklahoma whose family lost their home after a tornado hit Moore City last May and killed about 25 people.
“This is such a personal story for so many people in this country,” Wayne Callies said. “It was important for me that we not do the glamorous Hollywood version of it, but that we do the really raw, really honest version because this is so real to many people.”

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