You will want to know what it feels like to be pulled by the strong hands of Jason Momoa from the cyan waters of the Pacific and then to flop, into the belly of a canoe, like some recently netted fish. It feels, I can tell you, wonderful.

This was on a paradisiacal morning in mid-July, just off the Western coast of Oahu. From the wing of a bright orange outrigger canoe, Momoa, casual in a sleeveless shirt and striped pants, like a god on holiday, pointed out the beach where he had learned to surf, the reef where his umbilical cord is buried. His father, Joseph Momoa, lay beside him, cradling an enormous conch shell.

“Aloha, what’s up, my boy?” Joseph said.

“What’s up, Pops?” his son answered as the canoe sped through the water. “This is awesome.” In mellow moments like these, I could almost forget the primal horror of sitting in a swimsuit next to a man who often tops most-handsome lists. A waterman in the canoe’s stern gestured toward a cove famous for Galápagos sharks, and then suggested we take a dip. Most days, I avoid shark-infested seas. But Momoa, 45, seemed unconcerned. I jumped in.

Built like a boulder, if boulders had bedroom eyes and smelled of musk and adventure, Momoa is a bruiser with a difference. Though undeniably an action star — he has played an alien, a barbarian, a warlord in “Game of Thrones,” a swordmaster in the “Dune” movies, a superhero who could absolutely crush a freestyle relay in “Aquaman” — he pairs hypermasculinity with surprising sweetness.

“The thing that makes him an interesting actor is his enormous heart and empathy — all in the body of a Trojan god,” Emilia Clarke, who played his bride on the HBO megahit “Game of Thrones,” would later tell me in an email. (Asked about the first time they met, Clarke wrote: “I remember it vividly! He wrestled me to the ground in the foyer of the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Belfast screaming ‘WIFEY!!!’”)

Momoa prefers the descriptor “sensitive alpha male.” He knows what he looks like — “a big tough guy,” as he put it. But he prides himself on being in touch with his feelings. “I still am very masculine. But I embrace the feminine side and also feel like I am OK to be vulnerable, that it’s not a weakness.” On the canoe, he wore a pink scrunchie, a signature.

As Momoa tells it, he spent a decade and more convincing Hollywood he belonged. Now he makes his own way, which had brought him back here, within paddling distance from where he was born.

Momoa had returned to Oahu to host the world premiere of his passion project, the ambitious Apple TV+ series “Chief of War.” (The first two episodes stream on Aug. 1; the other seven follow weekly.) Epic in scope and scale, the series centers on Ka’iana (Momoa), a real-life 18th-century warrior who witnessed the unification of the Hawaiian islands and the earliest colonial incursions. Very few Hollywood stories set in Hawaii have actually centered on Native Hawaiians. “Chief of War,” as Momoa sees it, is a necessary corrective. “We have our own stories to tell,” he said.

This project turned out to be more personal than he knew. During preproduction he learned that he shares a family name and very likely ancestry with a brother of Ka’iana, which made the show feel fated. Momoa created and wrote it with his longtime collaborator Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and directed the tumultuous Season 1 finale. But it wasn’t only personal.

“We did it for Hawaii,” Momoa would tell me later that day. He understood the weight of that. “If we [expletive] up, we’re not coming home, and this is my home.”

I had come to Oahu to understand why Momoa, who typically plays toughs and tricksters, had pushed so hard to make a serious-minded period drama performed mostly in Ōlelo Hawai’i, a language he does not speak. Also, if your editor texts to ask if you would like to go to Hawaii to write about Jason Momoa, you will say yes. Then you will spend several weeks agonizing over what constitutes a “work swimsuit.”

AS A CHILD, MOMOA was raised by a single mother, an artist, amid Iowa corn fields. His mother taught him a love of old movies. “I didn’t watch ‘Conan’ growing up,” he said of the fantasy franchise in which he would later star. “I watched ‘Rear Window’ and ‘Gone With the Wind.’”

Still he never imagined becoming an actor. That changed when he was 19, having moved to Oahu to spend some time with his father, a painter and a waterman. (A noted rigger, Joseph works often with the company that supplied the canoe.) Momoa was folding shirts at a surf shop when he heard that “Baywatch Hawaii,” a soft reboot of the David Hasselhoff original, was looking for local actors. Despite a blank-page résumé, he was hired, and you can see him in old episodes, sun-kissed and baby-faced, running across the sand.

He didn’t know how to act, not yet, and to this day he remains more of a presence than a transformative performer, but he found that he loved it. “I actually became obsessed, going, Oh my god, I can study life, I can be anything,” he said.

When “Baywatch Hawaii” ended in 2001, Momoa floundered. Agents wouldn’t meet with him; neither would most casting directors. Some guys at a major agency told him to cut his hair. He let it form dreadlocks instead, then bought an Airstream and drove out to California and rock climbed.

A few years later, he landed on another show set in Hawaii, the forgettable “North Shore,” and then jumped to “Stargate Atlantis,” where he played a space alien named Ronon Dex. (Other bonkers names on the Momoa C.V. include Connor Slaughter, Miami Man, Duncan Idaho.) He met Lisa Bonet in those years, and they married and had two children. Momoa also became a stepfather to Zoë Kravitz, Bonet’s daughter from a previous marriage to Lenny Kravitz. (Bonet and Momoa separated in 2020 and divorced, amicably, in 2024.)

“Game of Thrones,” the hit HBO fantasy, should have been his breakout, and in some ways it was. He was unknown to the show’s creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, when he beat out name actors to play Khal Drogo, a nomadic warlord.

“None of them were believable as someone who could lead and inspire an army,” Benioff and Weiss wrote in a joint email. “Momoa was.” He brought warmth and generosity to Drogo and also, they added, “the awareness that he could rip both your arms off.”

His character died at the end of Season 1. Momoa didn’t work for a year after and not by choice. He had been convincing as a warlord. Maybe too convincing. As he tells it, casting directors didn’t know what to do with him. Some were surprised he spoke English. “I’m like, I laugh, I cry, I’m charming,” Momoa recalled thinking. “I’m just acting.”

Determined to make his own work, he founded a production company with Sibbett and the director Brian Mendoza. Their first movie, the biker noir “Road to Paloma,” got him onto a Sundance series, which led to a Netflix series, “Frontier.”

Then DC Comics put Aquaman’s trident in his hand. In several movies, Momoa plays Arthur Curry, a figure of superhuman strength and agility who speaks for the sea. This was practically typecasting. (I dare you to look at Momoa, as I did, hair blowing, balanced on the wing of a canoe and not think: superhero.) And yet in the comics, Curry is blue-eyed and blond, which made Momoa something of a risk.

“If this fails, I’m screwed,” he thought at the time. It did not fail. “Aquaman” made more than a billion dollars and burnished Momoa’s reputation as a motorcycle-riding, tomahawk-throwing, heavy metal-worshiping softy.

Certainly, this is how his dearest see him. “He’s a teddy bear,” his daughter, Lola, 18, explained. “He’s just a cave-looking teddy bear.”

This was a few hours later, at the municipal beach we had seen from the canoe, where Momoa had gathered family and friends for a sunset potluck. When I arrived, he was sitting in the bed of a pickup truck with his girlfriend, the actress Adria Arjona — she starred with him in the Netflix movie “Sweet Girl” and appeared in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, “Blink Twice.” He introduced me around. (A thick-necked buddy named Dwayne kissed me on the cheek, and because there were so many faces, so many loved ones, it wasn’t until hours later that I realized that pal was Dwayne Johnson. Then I had quiet hysterics in the back of an Uber.)

Before we began the interview, Momoa had me kick off my sandals and walk down to the waterline with him, the better to feel the sand between my toes, its warmth and weight.

“This is the best beach in the world,” he said. “All my memories are right here.”

ONCE MOMOA HAD some industry weight of his own, he used it to vary his roles. He hosted “Saturday Night Live,” a longtime dream. He played Garrett Garrison, a washed up gamer in a pink fringed jacket, in “A Minecraft Movie,” a box office sensation that made the elementary school set practically feral with joy. “You’re always big, tough, strong,” Jared Hess, the movie’s director, recalled telling Momoa about the character. “It’s going to be so fun to see you get your butt kicked by a pig.”

Momoa was all for it. “That’s more him,” his daughter confirmed. She was snuggled up to him at the picnic table where Momoa sat for an interview. Across the table was his son, Nakoa-Wolf, 16. Father and son were holding hands.

Momoa had another, more essential move to make. For a decade, he and Sibbett had been hoping to make a Hawaiian story. They were mindful that most Hawaii-focused movies (“From Here to Eternity,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) and TV shows (“The White Lotus”) were not really about Hawaiians, who have tended to appear mostly as lovable extras. (One sweet exception: this summer’s live action “Lilo and Stich.”) They thought they could do better.

“There’s tons of amazing stories, but we’ve just never had the opportunity,” Momoa said. So he would make one.

After spending three seasons as a warlord in the Apple TV+ series “See,” he figured he had earned enough good will to get Apple to listen to his pitch for “Chief of War.” “They know how much I’ve bled for them,” Momoa said.

Apparently Apple did, signing off on a lush, expensive series about a little known war chief whom contemporaneous accounts describe as dashing, herculean. Ka’iana’s story would be filmed in Hawaii and New Zealand with a cast of mostly Polynesian actors, known and unknown. To ensure authenticity, the production hired more than a dozen cultural consultants, expert artisans to carve tikis, hull canoes and hand-sew the feathered capes and helmets worn by nobles.

“Those things are real,” Sibbett said. “Those are not props. We are not just building a show, we are showing the world who we are.”

Having played fictional superheroes, Momoa would now play a real one in “Chief of War,” a Polynesian one. As Ka’iana, Momoa fights, jokes, schemes and loves. He wallops enemies with a shark-tooth studded weapon, rips out a tongue. (A Momoa signature: He performed a similar move in “Game of Thrones.”) And when Ka’iana quirks an eyebrow or dares a smile, suddenly there’s Momoa, grinning beneath the helmet. “He is always a little bit himself,” said Luciane Buchanan, who stars opposite him as a queen, Ka’ahumanu.

A viewer would never know that Momoa often struggled with the role. Onscreen, he wears Ka’iana’s ceremonial garb as easily as board shorts. “It’s in my DNA,” he said. But he sometimes questioned Ka’iana’s choices. And the language proved difficult. As Sibbett said, “He thought the ancestors would come and help him.” They did not.

Then, just before shooting began on the finale’s climactic battle, Hawaii’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, began to erupt. It felt, to Momoa and Sibbett, like a blessing.

Momoa has a habit of creating found family wherever he goes. And he did that during filming on “Chief of War,” inviting the cast and crew to beach barbecues and house parties. “He likes to feed everybody,” Temuera Morrison, a star of “Aquaman” and “Chief of War,” said. “He’s got those old Polynesian roots still in him. He loves having people around.”

That was evident on the municipal beach as Momoa moved among his guests, loving and beloved, necking a slightly warm beer. He looked like a chief in a tank top, and his fame in that moment felt both inevitable and ancillary. It reminded me of something his father had said, unprompted on the canoe, as he looked with love on a regal, sunglassed Momoa. “This son, he didn’t need to be popular,” Joseph said. “He is just my son.”

Later, Sibbett echoed this. “This is who he is, it’s always who’s he’s been,” Sibbett said. “If the stars weren’t in alignment and he never made it into the industry, it wouldn’t change how people listen to him. It wouldn’t change how people see him.”

Momoa did make it, and while he might have preferred fewer years overlooked and underestimated, those years had brought him here, to this beach at sunset. “It was meant to happen the way it was meant to happen,” he said. “It wasn’t handed out. It was [expletive] hard work. And I love it.”

I saw him again at the premiere, two nights later, on a makeshift stage at a nearby lagoon, introducing “Chief of War” to a crowd of thousands. He stood in sunglasses, his hair loose, as he thanked “the small army of people that I love” who brought this show into being, who made his dreams as real as Hollywood allows.

“I love you very much,” he told the crowd. “I’m happy to be home.”