Exclusive | Jason Momoa feels Hollywood has always depicted Hawaii as a ‘postcard’, says Chief of War is an attempt to fix this ‘false advertising’

The Aquaman star is at home, in more ways than one, talking from Hawaii over Zoom. The postcard picture of Hawaii, that he aptly blames Hollywood for glorifying, screams silently in his backdrop. But Momoa doesn’t turn around and take a holy dip into the Hawaiian waters like Aquaman would. This isn’t that Jason Momoa. This one’s seen Hawaii inside out over the years. “I’m excited to put it into more movies. It took us a while to pull the clout to be able to tell a story of this magnitude. I hope people like it so we can keep telling stories from what we know,” he says.

Momoa is not only an actor on Chief of War, but also a co-creator with Thomas Pa’a Sibbett, as well as the director on the finale. It’s not his first directorial adventure, but certainly a far cerebral departure from his image of playing the tough guy on screen. He believes he holds within himself as much diversity as his homeland does. “There are moments — when the sun is down in a way that it’s not sunset, to the deepest violets, and the way the ocean turns into smells, and the deepest greens in the jungle. Then there’s the place I was raised in, which is very dry. It almost looks ugly to everyone. To me, that’s ultimate beauty. There’s red clay, dust, and sand,” he says, painting two pictures on a single canvas.

Momoa, who’s previously helmed the 2014 thriller Road to Paloma, drops a revelation: he prefers direction to acting. “I dive into directing,” he says in true-blue Aquaman style. “I love being behind the camera more than being in front of it. This time around, being in front of the camera was even more challenging because there were so many things going on behind the camera. Directing the finale, I felt so much at home because I thrive on chaos. I go insane waiting in the trailer for my scene. I need to be doing a lot of things at once, that’s just the way I operate,” he adds.

But helming such a massively mounted show came with its own share of vulnerabilities, Momoa admits. “Oh yeah, I’m human. I go through that all the time. But gratitude is a huge one. If I found myself out of place or out of sorts, there’s gratitude that I’ve to constantly remember and hopefully, that pulls me out of it. When I’m in a weird headspace and I can’t get out of it, I think of my children, a beautiful thing. I call up my loved ones, stay grounded, and get back to the course,” he says, adding that he welcomes the “intense responsibility” of representing his people. “The responsibility of being able to tell this story is the most important thing I’ll do in my career,” he declares.

Momoa has pushed his physicality to limits throughout his career, in films like Conan the Barbarian (2011), as an underwater superhero in the Aquaman franchise, as a cannibal in The Bad Batch (2016), as the chief antagonist in Fast X (2023), and as Khal Drogo in HBO’s seminal fantasy show Game of Thrones. Chief of War is special, as he had to train in the Hawaiian martial arts form of Kapu Kuʻialua. “Physicality in any role is no stranger to me. It’s fun to learn, adapt, and try all different kinds of martial arts. The Hawaiian martial arts is called Lua. I never had the opportunity to learn it. But we had great masters who trained us actors, and not just the stuntmen. That’s one of the best things of taking on a role — generally, you get an expert who’s spent their entire life to learn a skill and you get to learn the basics of that very quickly,” says Momoa.

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Besides the story, setting, and action, another aspect that aided Momoa’s homecoming was speaking in his native tongue. “I’ve had to learn a couple of other languages before, but those were extremely easier than my own native language. I had a very challenging time. I thought my ancestors would just come down and tell me, ‘You’ve got this.’ But it was extremely hard for me,” confesses Momoa, who claims he’s still learning the language, along with his children. “I took it very seriously. My teacher lived with me so I learnt on the side wherever I went. Our linguists were given the liberty to ask us to go again if our language or diction wasn’t right, no matter who the actor is. Even though it was a challenge, when they felt proud, you knew that you had that stamp of approval,” says Momoa, before bidding his Aloha.