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BRITISH GQ: If anyone has the authority to tell us to clean up the planet, it’s Aquaman. So GQ sat down to talk to him about his efforts to rescue the ocean from plastic pollution and (yes, really) maybe even rescuing Timothée Chalamet again in Dune.
Jason Momoa doesn’t exactly love that he keeps dying, if you really want to get into it. “My kids are always like, ‘Are you gonna die again? You always die,” he says, a little forlornly. “I obviously made a name for myself dying so if you see me it’s like, ‘Momoa’s gonna jump on the bomb, I know it!’”
Thus far he has been shot in the head, blown up, smothered, died by suicide, had his throat slashed, and been stabbed in both the stomach and the chest. It was watching his most recent death, in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi spectacular Dune with his 12-year-old son, that really got to him. “It was pretty heart wrenching, cause I was like, ‘I’m right here buddy!’ But he was like, ‘Papa nooooooooo,’ he recalls, howling like a dog at the moon. “I said: ‘Listen dude: if you’re gonna go out, go out big.’”
Which might make it sound as though the Aquaman actor is a mere mortal, but if you saw Jason Momoa walking down the street (and not, say, emerging from the ocean with a trident in his hand, and the
promise of avenging his sea queen mother glinting in his eye) you might still wonder if this towering man didn’t arrive on dry land using a branch of coral as a surfboard, having caught a wave from a kingdom far more exciting than anywhere on planet earth. Some actors inhabit characters nothing like themselves; others play those that seem forged in their own image. Jason Momoa, built like a Land Cruiser, with a tangled mane of dark hair, and wide, open face topped with arched eyebrows, belongs to the latter camp. The army of otherworldly alphas the 42-year-old has played include a barbarian combatant hellbent on revenge (Conan the Barbarian), a Dothraki warlord (Game of Thrones), the warrior leader of the Alkenny tribe (See), a tribesman from planet Sateda in the Pegasus Galaxy (Stargate Atlantis), and, most famously, a majestic sea king (Aquaman).
In the comic books and DC mega movies, Aquaman rules over the kingdom of Atlantis, protecting the planet and all the lands that lurk beneath the surface of the ocean. But lately, Momoa just wants to walk through a shop without seeing a plastic bottle that will end up floating in the sea for the next thousand years.
“Every day there’s a dumpster fire,” he says. “Yes we’re trying to go green but what are the batteries doing? What are we doing to indigenous cultures and what does that mean? I’m not just going to blindly do this, there’s got to be proper laws written around these things. I don’t like bitching, I want to do something. But I feel like I don’t have much time,” he says over Zoom, his voice filled with the mixture of theatrical urgency and wide-eyed sincerity that you’d expect from a superhero at a moment of crisis, the ticking clock of an action movie hurrying him along almost audible in the background.
And to be fair, he’s not wrong. We are speaking in early July when Momoa is in London to shoot Fast and Furious 10. Two weeks from now the UK will witness the hottest temperature on record as motorways bend from the force of the sun and train tracks spontaneously burst into flames.
So he’s doing something. In June of this year Momoa was designated the UN Environment Programme’s Advocate for Life Below Water, working alongside charities and scientists to raise awareness and funding for the triple threat of crises we are facing of climate change, biodiversity loss and extreme pollution. Celebrity activism is often regarded at best as naive do-gooding and at worst as cynical branding. Momoa, though, is genuinely passionate about being Aquaman on screen and off. His advocacy has seen him campaign for reducing single-use plastic pollution, in part by setting up aluminium-bottled water company Mananalu, who remove plastic headed toward the ocean. He’s also collaborated on a range of plastic-free clothing and sporting apparel, from trainers to T-shirts.
Jason Momoa Aquaman and real life superhero is on a quest to save the ocean
So far his quest has seen him make an impassioned speech in front of the UN, and issue a desperate plea to Coca-Cola’s packaging company to start using aluminium to bottle water. This cause is personal to Momoa, because as it happens his origin story is about water, too.
Growing up in the landlocked Midwest, Momoa would stick posters of surfers inside his locker even though the other kids, all of whom looked totally different to him, would make fun of him for being a surfer dude. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii; his mother a photographer with Irish, German and Pawnee tribe ancestry, his father a painter with Native Hawaiian roots. When he was six months old he moved with his mother to Norwalk, Iowa, but growing up still felt the pull of the island he first landed on 4,000 miles away. One summer, Momoa remembers taking a yellow bus that wound its way all the way down to the Florida Keys to study at a marine biology camp and marvel at the creatures that lived beneath waves. “My dad was always in the water, you couldn’t get him out,” Momoa says. “He was a steersman and when I was younger I idolised him and my uncles and my cousins because they’re all surfers.” In the summers when he returned to Honolulu he took part in the Junior Lifeguard Program, which would end up being Method acting-level training for his first big break on Baywatch: Hawaii in the ‘90s, and after finishing high school he returned home to enroll in the University of
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