[This story contains spoilers from season one, episode eight of Chief of War, “The Sacred Niu Grove.”]
Jason Momoa has taken a lot of blows onscreen over the years, but shooting the penultimate episode of Chief of War required him to endure a different kind of gut punch.
“Even talking about it now is making me emotional,” Momoa tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The sounds that are coming out of my body, I haven’t heard before. I’ve never experienced that. I didn’t have to act any of that. I’m really going through the horrors of that [trauma].”
Written by Momoa, Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Doug Jung, and directed by Momoa’s long-time producing partner, Brian Andrew Mendoza, the eighth episode of the Apple TV+ historical drama finds Momoa’s native Hawaiian warrior Ka’iana enduring one personal tragedy after another. At the end of the previous episode, Ka’iana watched in horror as Captain Simon Metcalfe (Jason Hood) and his crew of “paleskins” murdered hundreds of innocent Hawaiians — a massacre that could have been prevented if Chief Kamehameha I (Kaina Makua) had listened to Ka’iana’s warnings about European settlers over the counsel of his chief advisor, Moku (Moses Goods).
But rather than admitting they had been mistaken, Kamehameha and Moku not only kick Ka’iana off Kamehameha’s council, they also initially decline to use the “red-mouthed weapons,” or guns, that Ka’iana had procured from abroad to assist them in their impending battles with the blood-thirsty, power-hungry kings, Keōua of Hawai’i (Cliff Curtis) and Kahekili of Maui (Temuera Morrison). Without the protection of Kamehameha, who is also Keōua’s estranged cousin, Ka’iana sees no choice but to flee with his family. But before Ka’iana can get the rest of his loved ones on board with his new plan, Keōua effectively declares war on Ka’iana by killing his younger brother, Nahi (Siua Ikale’o).
Avenging Nahi’s death will be the driving force behind Ka’iana and his family heading into the season finale, which drops this Friday. While Chief of War was originally ordered and billed as a limited series, co-creators Momoa and Sibbett decided, five weeks before the start of production, that they wanted to plant a bunch of seeds that could come to fruition in future seasons.
“We were like, ‘Man, we have to tell more. We have to open this [story] up.’ But when we changed the structure, we knew that Nahi was going to have to die,” Sibbett tells THR. “It was also one of the areas that I veered away from history a little bit. Nahi didn’t die this way, but I knew for story [purposes], it was going to create the maximum amount of emotional impact that we need to carry us into the finale and then hopefully give us that draw for a season two. We needed the family to lose something significant.”
Like the viewers, those who worked on Chief of War had a similar reaction to the news of Nahi’s untimely demise. “I remember when we put those pages out, the crew were reading and getting really upset. I had people coming up to me like, ‘What are you doing? He can’t die! Why are you doing that?’ There was even this really small, for a short time, #SaveNahi campaign,” Sibbett recalls with a laugh. “The fact that people were reacting that way about Nahi told me we actually made the right decision, because nobody wants [him to die],” Sibbett adds. “If they’re upset and really frustrated, that’s actually a good thing because that means they’re going to need to see how it pans out, and audiences will keep coming back to find out more.”
Jason Momoa as Ka’iana and Kaina Makua as Chief Kamehameha I in the penultimate episode.
Ikale’o, a Tongan-American actor who made his TV debut a few years ago in an episode of NCIS: Hawaii, had an inkling that his character would be killed off. “I had to check my ego and prioritize the message,” he says. “Some of these deaths in major shows really, really get you. So I thought about it, like, ‘Okay, my job now is to serve that purpose of that scene,’ and I had made my peace with it before I signed on to this show.”
The little research that Ikale’o was able to do in preparation for the role always described Nahi in relation to his older brother. “Nahi wants to be somebody [on his own], but I think he figures that his place in the family is to be the follower of Ka’iana, to be the supporter of Ka’iana, and also a fierce protector of the ohana, the unit. He was always idealizing and idolizing Ka’iana as the go-to for everything,” Ikale’o explains. The fact that Ka’iana returns from his travels with a newfound wariness — when he used to fear nothing or nobody on the islands — leaves Nahi feeling “deeply crushed,” even if Nahi “held on for so long to this idea of getting together again” and going back to normal.
Over the course of the season, Nahi developed an attraction to Ka’iana’s wife’s sister, Heke (Mainei Kinimaka). In true Romeo & Juliet fashion, Nahi and Heke finally consummate their relationship in episode eight — only for them to end up surrounded by Keōua, who challenges Nahi to a one-on-one fight to the death, and his men.
“Nahi’s journey is always looking for a place to belong, because we were originally from Maui, we went to Kauai, and now we are kind of fugitives of Maui, but we’re now foreigners living in Hawai’i. He’s always looking for a place to put his feet and call home. Finally, when he gives into Heke, he realizes Heke is home [for him],” Ikale’o says of his character’s headspace in his final moments. “So when you get to this final moment where home is being threatened, Nahi’s brain immediately goes into, ‘This is where I’m going to give everything.’”
Using only his hands, Keōua beats Nahi’s face into a bloody pulp and then leaves him paralyzed on the ground — all while a physically restrained Heke can do nothing but watch and scream in horror. After she is presumably sexually assaulted by Keōua and his men, a despondent Heke returns home to deliver an ominous message to Ka’iana, who, along with his other brother Namake (Te Kohe Tuhaka), rushes to find Nahi’s dead body in the woods. (Momoa says he intentionally didn’t want to see Ikale’o until they shot that harrowing post-mortem scene.)
“Everybody’s reaction to Nahi’s death was so beautiful and so real,” Ikale’o says, his eyes welling up mid-sentence. “The way Ka’iana and Heke had mourned and how it transformed them into the fierceness of their retaliation and revenge was so beautiful, and also it feels like a compliment to me, too.”
Siua Ikale‘o (center) as Ka’iana’s younger brother, Nahi.
Apple TV+
During the writing process, the creative team decided to give Nahi a traditional chief burial. While not originally scripted, Momoa, an avid rock climber, wanted to find a way for Ka’iana to scale a cliff to bury his brother’s remains. “Brian found the right places where we could climb up and do what is traditionally what you would do,” Momoa explains. “You’d take his bones, clean his bones, wrap them up in tapa and hide them. And the person who took it up there wouldn’t come back either because it would [have to] be a secret.”
After hiding Nahi’s bones on his own, Ka’iana lets out a deeply visceral, guttural shriek in agony. “That moment on the edge of the cliff is hands down the worst place I’ve ever been in my life as an actor, because I was just in so much pain,” Momoa admits. “That was just a time in my life where I was in a lot of fucking pain.
“We had to shoot that whole scene in reverse, and once we had it, Brian asked for one more [take]. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I was at a place where I was just … shook,” Momoa continues. “I think a lot of actors want to stay in that [headspace] and keep digging deeper, and of course, you could probably get deeper and you could come across many more amazing moments as an actor. But I was like, ‘I have to tap out. I don’t want to be in that pain anymore.’”
In the finale, which Momoa also co-wrote and directed, Ka’iana will channel all of that pain into facing off against Keōua, played by Momoa’s former Aquaman co-star Morrison. “The finale was a dream for me to be able to do. I was very, very specific on how I wanted to shoot it,” Momoa teases. “It was the most brilliant thing to have full control over what you want to do and go like, ‘This is my life’s work. This is what I want to paint, and hold me accountable for [my choices]. Every choice in this is mine.’ It’s a beautiful thing to finally be able to tell your ancestors’ story.”
For Morrison, an accomplished Māori actor who even helped facilitate the show’s shoot in New Zealand, playing Keōua was particularly challenging because he had to find a way to honor the real-life historical figure — who still has living descendants — while being forced to tell a more simplified version of his story for the purposes of this show. Morrison ultimately found ways to distinguish his version of Keōua from his real-life counterpart — he opted for a significantly different hairstyle, and he didn’t want to be decked out in any kind of tattoos because his Keōua would think that his “blood was too sacred.”
In Chief of War, Keōua was in line to inherit the Hawai’i throne from his father, King Kalani’opu’u — only for his cousin, Kamehameha, to be unexpectedly named as his father’s successor. “My interpretation is that [Keōua] was a traditionalist and a conservative, and there are rules to being a part of a royal lineage. [He believes] that those rules had been transgressed and that his cousin should never have accepted what was bestowed upon him,” Morrison says.
“My character’s point of view is that, ‘No good will come from this breaking of our traditions, from usurping my right to serve my people in the way that I see fit,’” he adds. “[Doing] that will be to the detriment of my people, and I will fight for that. I believe in my gods, I believe in my traditions, I will not take up the gun, and I will not put on pants. And in order to fulfill my destiny or my obligations as a king, I must earn that by going to war and beating my cousin.”
In order to defeat Keōua, Ka’iana will once again have to lean on the two most important women in his life: his wife Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinepehinga), who is essentially his moral compass, and Kamehameha’s wife, Ka’ahumanu (Luciane Buchanan), with whom he shares a pessimistic worldview and an undeniable connection.
Moses Goods as Moku with Momoa and Te Kohe Tuhaka as Namake in the finale.
The title Chief of War may suggest a male-dominated story, but it is really the women who are calling many of the shots from behind the scenes. By the end of the penultimate episode, Kupuohi and Ka’ahumanu are able to convince Kamehameha to use Ka’iana’s red-mouthed weapons in order to have a fighting chance against Keōua’s army. But the actors hesitate to say that Ka’iana is embroiled in some kind of love triangle.
“When we’re coming from the western industry, we automatically go, ‘This is a love triangle. These two girls are going to hate each other.’ But throughout the process, me and Luciane were like, ‘No, no, no. We don’t want to be pitted against each other,’” O’Hinepehinga says. “It’s not this woman versus this woman, because love does look different in Indigenous cultures. It wasn’t considered wrong or offensive for them to take lovers outside of their marriage. That wasn’t something that was frowned upon. From my understanding, [Ka’ahumanu] wanting to get in with Ka’iana doesn’t undermine that. Those relationships can be separate.
“There’s this dynamic between Kupuohi and Ka’ahumanu where they have this mutual respect and understanding, and a lot of that did come from the fact that Kupuohi, prior to falling in love with Ka’iana, had actually been married to a chief,” continues O’Hinepehinga. “I think in a lot of ways, she saw a lot of herself in Ka’ahumanu and a lot of the struggles and obstacles that she was facing, and she went, ‘Here is an opportunity for me to support, to uplift another wahine who’s going through that same thing.’”
Momoa promises that future seasons of Chief of War would delve further into the lives of these women, who are just as — if not more — adept at navigating the turbulent politics of that era as the men are. Although “nothing’s for certain yet,” especially given the show’s high price tag, Momoa says he feels “very positive” about a renewal.
“The show’s doing really well with critics, with fans. I get so many compliments about it, and I haven’t [heard] any really bad things. It just makes my heart feel beautiful, and Hawaii’s happy. I think Apple [execs] are very happy, and we have a great relationship,” Momoa says. “Listen, if people really resonate with it, there’s so many possibilities of what can happen. Next season, if there is one, oh, it’s all [coming] out, because this story is fucking huge, dude … and that’s why it’s taken time.”
For now, the action star is doing everything he can just to convince people to watch his life’s work. “Most people wait and binge, and I get it. But my biggest hope now that it’s out is to go, ‘Get on it right now, watch up to episode eight, and just sit with it for the week.’ I want you to watch and be like, ‘Fuck, there’s only one [episode] left,’” Momoa says. “And you ain’t going to see me for a very long time! I haven’t shot anything new yet. So enjoy what you have right now and sit with it for the week. We gave it our all. And if you love anything that I’ve done, this is the best I’ve ever given — and this is the best that I got.”
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Chief of War is now streaming on Apple TV+, with the season finale set to drop on Sept. 19.
