Twisters is a box office smash, featuring A-lister Glen Powell, a high-octane soundtrack, and the best visual effects a budget of $155 million can buy. The Twisters, meanwhile, is a product of a studio called the Asylum, which for two decades has been pumping out “mockbusters,” films with similar titles and concepts to current theatrical hits—but shot with minuscule budgets, starring unknown actors, and dropped onto streaming services. Ever hear of Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, or Top Gunner: Danger Zone? Probably not, but if you’re up late and not paying close attention, you might have clicked to watch one anyway.
If so, you may have seen Kayla Fields—a product of the tiny Texas town of Sonora (about midway between Fort Stockton and San Antonio)—in her roles as Dr. Katherine Greene in DC Down, or Dr. Olivia Bennett in The Exorcists, or, most recently, as Dr. Erica Garland in The Twisters. You may be sensing a theme: “Apparently, the Asylum thinks I play a good smart girl,” Fields says.
A mockbuster aims to get viewers interested because of the title’s similarity to a current hit and then to stick around to enjoy the so-bad-it’s-good production values and storytelling. These movies are not high art, nor are they interested in rooting their screenplays in even the spotty science that, say, Twisters deploys. (In The Twisters, the film’s climax involves a series of tornadoes somehow combining into a 1,600-mile-long super tornado that threaten to eradicate the entire Eastern seaboard, with only Fields’s character and her ragtag team of scientists and journeymen in a position to stop it.)
Starring in a series of mockbusters may not have been exactly what Fields imagined for her career when she graduated from Texas Tech University and began pursuing her Hollywood dreams, but she’s got a practical, distinctly Texan mindset about the work she does in a tough industry: put your head down and do the work, be grateful for the opportunity, and don’t take yourself too seriously. So what’s it like to find yourself delivering dialogue such as “all the electronics that were supporting the sensor core are fried, so we’re not going to be able to stop the tornadoes now!” in a panicked tone? To find out, we caught up with Fields to talk mockbusting, growing up in small-town Texas, and her dream of working with Taylor Sheridan.
Texas Monthly: You’ve been in several mockbusters now. How did you get cast in the first one?
Kayla Fields: My manager, who is actually a native Oklahoma girl, submitted me just because it’s been, as I’m sure you know, a rough four years in this industry. So she was like, “Let’s just do some fun independent projects and see what we can get out there.” And the first one was called DC Down, which is about an earthquake that rocks DC, but at the same time there’s, like, terrorists trying to assassinate them. [Laughs.] It’s a whole ordeal, like, everything that can happen does happen. But I did a self-tape, sent it in, and got the offer, and I had the best time on it. It was so much fun. We got two weeks to shoot that one. The Asylum sometimes [does] a six-day shoot, but my first Asylum movie was two weeks, which is kind of standard for an independent, nonunion project.
TM: Have the other ones you’ve made been six-day shoots, or did you get the luxury of filming for two weeks on all three?
KF: The others were six days. I shot The Exorcists first, and my manager told me they wanted to use me again, and this time it was going to be six days, and I’d be on set maybe five of those days. And all I could think was, “For a two-hour movie? I’m gonna have five days on set as the lead? What are we talking about?” But I grew up in a tiny town of three thousand people called Sonora, on a ranch that’s been in my family forever, so I’m very accustomed to hard work and having to just put your head down and get it done. I just decided to pull on those roots and figure it out. And it’s a lot of fun, to be honest. You kind of feel like you’re doing a play, or prepping yourself for, I don’t know, a soap opera.
TM: A typical indie might aim to shoot five pages a day. On a six-day film, you’ve got to be shooting, what, fifteen, twenty pages a day?
KF: Fifteen’s a light day. On The Twisters, we’d show up to set and it’d be like, “Oh, great. We’re shooting twenty-five pages today. Everybody, let’s just get it done.” And as you saw, a lot of The Twisters is just us running around and having to get choreography correct. It was wild. There were days that I was like, there’s no way we make this. And we did it somehow. But the production team was fantastic, and we had a great director.
TM: Obviously you’re moving so much faster, but what elements of working on these make you feel like you’re on a regular set?
KF: All of it. Asylum is really good about making sure they have everything you need. They want to make sure that it’s going to look as good as possible. When I met my director, he was very adamant that if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right. We had a low budget, obviously, but he was like, “We’re going to do the best we possibly can.” So the setups were great. The actors, everybody was super professional. I’ve been on other sets, and they all feel the exact same. I’m just excited to hopefully soon find out what it feels like to be like on a movie set for, like, three months. I can’t even fathom that. Like, what are y’all doing with so much time?
TM: It seems like such an intense, pressure cooker sort of situation that if you do have three months, you’re going to know things that people who’ve never worked on a six-day, two-hour movie will never have learned.
KF: I think you’re right. I think what I’ve learned, honestly, from doing these intense, quick shoots that I’ll use when I do get to go on to those bigger-budget movies, studio movies, whatever it is, is that I’ve gotten really good at developing character quickly. I feel like this might be a secret, but I got the script for The Twisters two days in advance of our first shoot day. So I think it’s preparing me for a time when I can really sit down with the script, because most of the time you’re getting the script well, well in advance. I’ll be able to sit down and really develop the character, really be able to know everything that I can as an actor to make the best possible film. I feel like the next time I step onto a TV set or a big film set, I’ll feel like a champion, because I just had to learn so quickly.
TM: Do you get time to meet with the director to talk about character, or do you just kind of have to come in with what you’ve got?
KF: On The Exorcists we had a director who felt it was really important for us to get together and do a table read. We got to talk to him about character, which I really liked, because then we’re on the same page on day one. But that was the only time I’ve done that with them. Which is fun, because it also shows that they trust me as an actor to show up and bring what they’re going to hopefully enjoy, and things are going to be successful. So it’s a compliment but also a curse, I guess.
TM: I’ve never met an actor who didn’t want to have time to talk character with the director, but also it seems like there’s a looseness to the creative process here that must be empowering.
KF: It is! I’ve had the top dogs in Asylum just say, “We trust everything you do. Just keep doing you.” And that feels really good. Especially being in this industry where “no” happens the majority of the time. You get a “no” every single day of your life and you can start to think, like, “Am I doing something wrong? What’s going on?” And when you have people—the head of a studio—say “we just trust you to do what you do,” it’s such a compliment. It kind of makes you think, like, “I can do anything. I can be in any movie I want.”
TM: These aren’t art films, but there’s still an artistry to acting, just by the nature of what a performance is. How do you try to apply those skills to work that is objectively pretty silly?
KF: You know, I don’t really take myself too seriously as an artist. I grew up on a ranch. I have older brothers, but they were five and eight years older than me, so I was kind of left to my own devices a lot. And this was during the times growing up when your parents were like, “All right, come back when the sun’s going down!” So I would just disappear for eight hours and play pretend. And that’s what my career is now. I just love to pretend. There are a lot of people who are like, “I’m an artist—this is what I do.” And I went to theater school. I did the whole thing and got all the training. But being able to do something like The Twisters is so much fun, because I get to have that childlike creativity. You get to pretend that there is that big ol’ wall of twisters coming right at you.
TM: You’re doing mockbusters right now, and you’re really enjoying it. What’s your dream project?
Kayla Fields: A western. Honestly, all of the Yellowstone spin-offs. Like, we have 1883, 1923, we’re getting another one about the Four Sixes Ranch—that entire Taylor Sheridan world? That is the dream. It’s one thing to be able to do what you love and be an actor. It’s another to be able to tell stories about your actual roots and how you grew up, and do it authentically. And I would give anything to do that. That’s the dream.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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