Jason Momoa's Next Big Flex

The newly single fast x villain gets real about facing his greatest challenge, fighting for change, and finding a new path

- By Ben Court. Photographs by Jason Roman

Jason Momoa is a hard man to pin down.

Momoa is a little more than halfway through an eight-month shoot in New Zealand for an Apple TV+ show called Chief of War. Momoa cowrote, codirects, and stars on the nine-episode series, which tells the quasi-historical story, from an Indigenous perspective, of a Hawaiian chief in the late 1700s who tries to unite the warring islands in order to save them from the threat of colonization. When we finally connect by Zoom after some serious wrangling, it's midnight in New York and 5:00 P.M. Kiwitime; his assistant hands him an iPad as he walks off the set after wrapping an epic scene, which explains why he's wearing only a malo (a traditional Hawaiian loincloth) and a shit-eating grin with a swollen top lip. He uses a wipe to clean his sweaty face; dabs different members of the crew; and after lots of "Love you, bros" and "Love you, dudes" is ushered into a car that will whiz him back to his base camp in Auckland while we talk.

Even from 9,000 miles away, his energy slams like a chest bump. He leans forward and starts talking about the day's shoot, his green eyes blazing and his new head tattoo giving texture to his dome. He's both a fast talker and a serial mumbler, and his words and sentences sputter, then gush out, forming fast-moving stories. "I'm trying to figure out what I can and can't say, but my character, a chief called Ka'iana, traveled. to a foreign land to rescue a friend. It's like a prison riot, people hanging, people falling from the ceiling. There's musket shots and fires everywhere, just burning chaos." He sounds kind of like Stefon from