By Jake Kring-Schreifels

Copyright gq

The night before he started shooting Chief of War’s season finale, Jason Momoa drove between Kīlauea and Mauna Loa—two giant, active volcanoes on Hawaii Island—and had a premonition. “The fucking volcano’s going to go off,” he told producer Brian Mendoza. “I know it.” His bold proclamation was met with an eyeroll—Mauna Loa hadn’t erupted in 40 years. Yet around 3:30 a.m., Momoa woke up to learn his prediction had come true. “We’re like, holy shit,” he says. “We’re all kind of stunned.”
After the studio paused production a day so experts could review the air quality, Momoa—the episode’s star and director—gathered his cast and crew in the flowing volcano’s shadow and led everyone in prayer. It was a moment of ritual, recognition that they were stepping into something bigger than the show itself. Then another natural phenomenon occurred. Along the Kalapana lava field, where they stationed for an eight-day shoot, the skies darkened and dumped water all over the scorched earth. To some, the immediate sequence of events might have seemed like Mother Nature’s end-times warning to pack up and leave. But Momoa felt differently. The native Hawaiian saw the black and orange glow and the rare deluge as both a beautiful backdrop and baptismal blessing.
“That’s like the best omen you could get,” he says enthusiastically. “I just knew we were doing the right thing.”
Thus began Chief of War’s most immersive, climactic, and most ambitious sequence: an epic lava field battle where rival leaders—King Kamehameha (Kaina Makua) and Keoua (Cliff Curtis)—and their loyal tribes clash in bloody, gruesome combat. Over the course of “The Black Desert,” war chief Ka’iana (Momoa) leads Kamehameha’s army with recently acquired muskets and ammunition, wiping out the surprised opposition before unleashing more brutal, hand-to-hand acts of aggression. In an effort to unify and strengthen Hawaii, Kaiana knows the only complicated way forward is to embrace the modern world, which has already arrived on its shores.
Momoa had always envisioned directing this vicious battle atop the same volcanic rock where his ancestors fought. But he knew that returning to his native land would be full of logistical challenges and problem solving. Pulling it off meant shooting five film units simultaneously, gathering hundreds of native extras, and wearing proper footwear to traverse the jagged, glassy ground. Not to mention capturing it all in the right sequence of daylight. “Everyone thought it was mad except for my partners,” Momoa says. “It was just a fun, beautiful puzzle to put together.”
As Curtis recalls, “it was as epic as the pages that I saw when I read them.”

The first challenge was trekking to the lava field, which didn’t have any roads or infrastructure around it. Though the studio offered them a sound stage in New Zealand, Momoa and co-creator, writer, and executive producer Thomas Pa’a Sibbett were adamant about shooting on the Big Island so they could allow the “lineal descendants of these characters to stand in the presence of their history and reenact the story of their people,” Sibbett says. That meant forging temporary roads with four-wheelers, lugging up camera equipment, creating electrical grids, consulting with environmentalists about safety measures, and mapping out daylight and shadows at precise times. “It’s a bit of an unbelievable feat because every day it was people constantly telling me, ‘No, no, no,’” Momoa says. “You just maneuver around it and figure out a way to do it.”
When conceiving the start of the battle, Sibbett wanted to make sure they stayed true to traditions of the past. Like any prize fight, theatrics and oration had to come first. “There’s always a spiritual battle that takes place before the physical one,” Sibbett says. “You let this sort of verbal attack happen and prepare people.” At first, Keoua’s war leader Opunui (Keala Kahuanui-Paleka) starts the proceedings with a handful of insults, calling Ka’iana “lowborn scum” and the “epitome of cowardice.” Ka’iana responds with his own slate of slurs, but then Momoa reaches for something guttural—and off-script—in English to instigate a few errant spear throws. “You’re basically trying to disgrace the other side and shame it. And that can go on for a long time,” Momoa says. “It came from playing the character and living in it and thinking about it like, ‘How the fuck am I getting these guys to charge?’”
The two factions aren’t just competing for land and power. Kaiana knows he must fortify Hawaii under Kamehameha if the island has any chance of stopping King Kahekili’s (Temuera Morrison) planned invasion. He also has a grudge against Keoua for killing his younger brother Nahi (Siua Ikale’o). “He starts off very Hawaiian, but now he is the only character that walks the line of both worlds,” Sibbett says of Kaiana. “When your back is against the wall and you hit rock bottom, his intentions aren’t completely pure as he goes into this.” Meanwhile, Keoua believes he’s battling for the soul of the islands, knowing Ka’iana has adopted the colonizers’ weaponry and ways of thinking. “I grounded my ideas around him as being a staunch traditionalist who didn’t want to yield to this incoming tide,” Curtis says. “He didn’t want to use their guns. He didn’t want to wear their pants. And he certainly didn’t want to speak English.”
A veteran on action sets, Momoa began orchestrating what Curtis calls “organized chaos,” shooting several fight scenes across the lava field at the same time. He had confidence in his actors, who had about two months to mentally and physically prepare for this ambitious endeavor. According to Mainei Kinimaka, who plays Nahi’s wife Heke, everyone worked closely with stunt coordinators to sharpen their skills in Lua (an ancient Hawaiian martial art) while wearing Vibram shoes, thin footwear that crew members painted skin tone to protect actors’ feet on the molten glass. “We did a lot of training on the lava field before we shot just so everybody could get used to where their fight is going to be,” Kinimaka says. “But I think the craziest obstacle in getting ready for that was also just staying awake, because we were rolling over all of these days.”
As intended, the action in “The Black Desert” is visceral and punishing. After Kaiana’s men take down Keoua’s front line with their muskets, the battle turns graphic—warriors redeploy their sharp shell paddles and wooden spears as merciless killing tools. Throughout the fight, Momoa gives each actor their own highlight reel, but saves the most gruesome shots for himself. At one moment, he rips out and takes a bite of the tongue of Keoua’s priest before slaughtering more warriors in various orifices, taking full advantage of what he calls the “gore unit.” “It’s just a prosthetic, jelly-style tongue,” Momoa says. “There’s stuff that we did that is so gnarly that obviously we couldn’t put in. They would rip each other’s nuts off. I had those testicles made. I’d bite a guy’s face and rip his face off and literally hold it up. It was great.”
The sequence’s most pivotal and redemptive beat, though, belongs to Heke. Facing Opunui to avenge her husband Nahi’s death, she’s outsized and seemingly overmatched—until Kamehameha’s wife, Ka’ahumanu (Luciane Buchanan), shoots him in the leg from above. What follows is a vicious slugfest and battle of wills, before Heke drags him down, spits in his expressive face, and, with a poison-tipped bone, delivers the final blow, puncturing first his stomach and then his eye.
The pair of actors trained and shot extensively with the stunt team on a small mat painted to look like rocks. But the bigger challenge was inhabiting Heke’s mindset. Kinimaka knew she needed to find the “extreme change that innocence in war undergoes,” which included spitting on Kahuanui-Paleka, a happy accident that represented how far she’d immersed herself in Heke’s emotions. “It needed to be that violent for Heke’s redemption,” she says. “It was a really intense scene to shoot. It was almost like a semi-out-of-body experience.” Even more impressive? She’d recently gashed her leg after stumbling on a faulty rock. “They took me straight to the hospital. I got all of the stitches, we went back to makeup, they covered my leg with tape, and then they spray-tanned the tape and we shot the scene,” she says. “I think we were all completely drained after that.”
Those kinds of setbacks were common on set, but Momoa’s energy and spirit imbued the cast and crew with resiliency. Sibbett remembers one moment when Momoa was capturing reaction shots of Kamhehemaha’s army. With speakers blaring motivational music and another rainstorm intermittently dousing them, Momoa yelled out the significance of the scene and the kind of looks he wanted to achieve through the downpour. “I get emotional because it was beautiful, man,” Sibbett says through tears. “To see the Hawaiian regalia, to see the weapons, to see the faces and to know that these people are standing in their lineage, standing as representatives of their people, of their history—and Jason directing that…I literally stood there and I was just like, ‘God, this is amazing.’”

The sequence ends in extreme peril. Lava breaks through the molten rocks and submerges the majority of Keoua’s army, leaving the chief alone and stranded to face off with Ka’iana. As he points a pistol at Keoua’s chest, a lava blast kicks them both backwards, charring Keoau’s motionless body and temporarily knocking out Ka’iana, all but securing Kamehameha’s victory. It’s a celebratory end to the season, but the death toll and the show’s misaligned relationships sustain its somber tone. “It shouldn’t feel victorious—we just killed our people in a civil war battle,” Momoa says. “I don’t want you to feel all that great about it.”
Of course, Momoa hopes to keep telling this story. He and Pibbett have Season 2 mapped out already. “I’m picking up exactly where it left off,” Momoa says. But when he reflects on what he accomplished over this first season, he is more than satisfied—for sharing his ancestors’ history, working with indigenous actors, and speaking their native language. “This is my dream come true,” he says. “My children were at the battle. They watched me make it. All my friends and family, everyone I love, is a part of it. And to be able to direct it, put this thing together, and have it on the largest platform at that point, it doesn’t get any fucking bigger.”
As further justification for shooting on Hawaii, Mother Nature had one last surprise. When production wrapped on the eighth day, the cast and crew celebrated with a party that night. The next morning, Sibbett woke up to news that Mauna Loa had stopped erupting. “So literally from the morning we started to the night we ended, the presence of the volcano was there,” Sibbett says. The metaphor was too powerful to be coincidental. “We may not be perfect and we may not even be doing it well, but we’re doing the right thing,” he says. “That was one of those wonderful Hawaiian moments that can only come when you’re in alignment trying to tell a story like that.”