The latest trailer for Disney’s live-action Moana arrived yesterday, bringing our best look yet at Dwayne Johnson as the demigod Maui. To no one’s surprise, the character is much the way he appears in the animated films: muscular, tattooed, and with long flowing hair. But getting that transformation just right was a surprisingly involved process.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the actor talked about what it took to get into character. First, even though Johnson is a former professional wrestler known for his beefy physique, being as big as he needed to be to play Maui required prosthetic assistance. That came in the form of a 40-pound bodysuit, which Johnson described as “grueling” to wear because of “how hot it was.”
“There was an idea that maybe we were gonna do this whole thing with visual effects, body and everything,” Johnson told EW. “But then there’s also a tactile, emotional resonance when it’s a real bodysuit. It moves and breathes with you. So we thought the best iteration of this was, let’s go for it, let’s challenge Joel [Harlow, Moana‘s make-up designer], and he rose to the occasion.”
But it’s not just the muscles that had to be carefully tailored. It was also Maui’s signature locks. For this, a special wig was required.
“As a wayfinder, you can just see him on the back of the canoe with the wind blowing,” Moana director Thomas Kail told EW. “We knew that it had to be something that could have real lift to it. Because you’re doing this on the water, ‘what does it look like wet?’ is a real conversation when you’re making Moana. That one weighs seven pounds more with all the water in it for all those hours a day.”
Johnson told the outlet it took about two and a half hours to become Maui-ready for filming. “The thing that became a challenge, that I had to work through very quickly, that I didn’t anticipate, was the prosthetics and the hair and then the body … There’s a freedom when you perform, whether it’s as an actor or singing. So that was an adjustment on how to actually work my emotions through the 40 pounds of prosthetics and hair and body that I had on me.”
That wig is certainly memorable, is it not? We’ll see more of it in action when Moana hits theaters July 10.
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