The sweet story behind ‘Twisters’ star Glen Powell’s dog Brisket

Glen Powell lights up any room he enters.

The Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone but You star has charisma for days. But on the set of Entertainment Weekly‘s Twisters cover shoot, the actor is playing second fiddle to everyone’s new favorite, Brisket the rescue pup.

Powell adopted the dog from the Labelle Foundation while filming the “standalone sequel” to the 1996 classic Twister. (“We’re on set, and I was like, ‘Are you sure you want to get a puppy right now?’ recalls Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung. “But he did, and everybody loved that dog.”)

Everybody including EW’s creative team, who couldn’t help but grab some outtake footage from our photoshoot and turn Brisket into a cover star.

“I was going through a breakup at the time and was in the middle of Enid, Oklahoma, and I had always wanted a dog,” Powell — who’d been dating model Gigi Paris — tells EW. “It was something I thought about a lot, but it was somewhere in this coffee shop in Enid…. I don’t even know how to describe it, I just had the desire to be a father.”

The actor says he was following a lot of dog adoption and rescue Instagram accounts (who isn’t?) and came across a picture of Brisket. Knowing the adoption process is difficult, he sought out any friends he knew who followed the rescue (or anyone associated with it) online and asked them to vouch for him.

“I literally messaged saying, ‘Please put in a good word for me,'” Powell shares. “I sent them a heartbreakingly depressing video of me why I needed this dog.”

It worked, and Powell took a weekend off filming to fly to Los Angeles and collect Brisket.

“Everybody knew how excited I was,” he says of the Twisters cast and crew. “I was like, ‘Guys, I’m going to pick him up!'”

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Upon arriving to set, Brisket made his presence known. “He was crate training and all that stuff, so he was crying through the night,” says Powell. “I felt like literally a new father, where I wasn’t sleeping while shooting this movie. But Brisket would just kick it with every department head, and he would sit in my chair and just sleep. I had the most adorable picture of Brisket in my Twisters chair at the rodeo. But he really became sort of a set mascot on that movie. It’s just adorable.”

As “beautiful” an experience filming Twisters was, Powell says Brisket has been a “magical gift” because of “the way that he brings me so much joy, and brings everybody around me joy.”

“Sets can be very lonely places,” he continues. “And it’s interesting when you see a dog that’s just filling you up with love, how it brings a cast together even more. There’s something wonderful about animals, about how they can bring our walls down a bit and expedite friendships and things like that. So yeah, Brisket’s been amazing. I consider him the best special feature of Twisters.”

Twisters blows into theaters July 19.

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