Johnson brought Samoan roots to Hobbs & Shaw
Action movie is the first of many potential spinoffs from $5B Fast & Furious series
The day Dwayne Johnson’s mother came to visit the Kauai set of Fast &
Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, emotions were already high. But not even the WWE superstar known in the ring as The Rock was steeled for what he saw after director David Leitch called “Cut!” on one of the most pivotal scenes in the
Fast & Furious spinoff. Johnson, in character as Luke Hobbs, the brawny American lawman he’s played since Fast Five, had just led an ensemble of fellow Polynesian actors, including Cliff Curtis and WWE’s Roman Reigns, in a siva tau or Samoan war dance.
This siva tau was special, created specifically for the film with the aid of Samoan cultural consultants. And as a sacred cultural tradition, Johnson told Leitch it warranted sensitivity. With this in mind, Leitch filmed only a few takes rather than the countless coverage angles typical of a blockbuster shoot of this size and scale.
The scene serves as the crackling prelude to a sequence in which Hobbs and his estranged brothers reconcile to face down a threat to humanity as they know it, by daisy-chaining a row of speeding, tricked-out vintage trucks to a helicopter while careening along the edge of a cliff (well, it is a Fast & Furiousmovie). In it, Johnson’s Hobbs, his traditional tattoos glistening under the night sky, roars alongside his brothers in arms, calling upon their ancestors.
“I look over and she is bawling,” Johnson says, grinning as he recounts the moment during a recent stop in Los Angeles. “The mama’s doing the ugly cry! I didn’t show her any rehearsals. She’s never heard me speak in Samoan to that extent. As I’m calling, I’m speaking to God and to atua, and we start our movements and I say, ‘This will be the last face you see before you die,’ and she’s bawling.
“After the take — it’s so beautiful and I’ll never forget this — all the guys go over to her,” he added. “‘Oh, Mama, are you OK?’ and give her hugs.”
Johnson, 47, has starred in more than a dozen hits that have grossed $100-million-plus (U.S.) domestically, including Rampage, San Andreas, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, four Fast sequels and the Disney animated film Moana, in which he voiced Maui, a legendary Polynesian demigod. This Hobbs & Shaw scene, though, felt far more personal in many ways. He kept the siva tau under wraps from his mother, Ata Johnson, until filming.
“There is a word in Polynesian language, mana — which is like spirit and soul and power — and the mana was so real on set,” he said. “We’re in the islands, we’re on sacred ground to begin with.”
In the first of several potential additional spinoffs to branch out from Universal’s $5-billion global hit franchise, Johnson has helped write his own heritage into one of the biggest action series on the planet. Introducing the film at its Los Angeles premiere, Johnson shared a startling fact: Hobbs & Shaw is the first film of its scale, and one of only a handful of films, period, to showcase the Samoan culture and setting in this way.
“It was our way of paying homage and honouring a culture that I’m very proud of and that has been responsible for teaching me defining values throughout the years,” he told the Times a few days later ahead of a whirlwind press tour.
“We always want the films to be reflective of the world, culturally,” said producer, screenwriter and Fast & Furious architect Chris Morgan, noting that inclusivity has been both organic and essential to the multicultural Universal franchise. “You get the sense that if the audience were transported into that world, that crew would accept them. All of them. For me, the greatest thing about the Fast films are that they represent global culture, positivity, family, heroism, and that sense of inclusion and belonging. It’s what makes it special and if you didn’t have that, it wouldn’t be Fast.”
Johnson and Jason Statham reprise the characters they’ve played in several instalments of the Fast cinematic universe. But while the never-mentioned Dominic Toretto is presumably living his life a quarter mile at a time elsewhere in the world — Justin Lin is currently directing Fast 9, with an ensemble anchored by original Fast & Furious stars Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez — Hobbs & Shaw takes the audience on a two-hander adventure from London to Samoa, with a stop for intrigue and overthe-top action in a secretive Chernobyl bunker.
Directed by stunt pro-turned-helmer Leitch ( Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) and written by Morgan and Drew Pearce, the story tracks Johnson’s Hobbs and Statham’s British former black ops baddie Deckard Shaw as they reluctantly team up to take on Idris Elba’s Brixton Lorr, a cybernetically enhanced super soldier trailing Shaw’s MI6 spy sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who is in possession of a dangerously powerful biological weapon.