On the island of Oahu, Dwayne Johnson pressed a warm bag of malasadas from Leonard’s Bakery into Michelle Khare’s hands and told her to bring them to Catherine Laga’aia with a message: they were from Uncle Maui. It was a small, sugary act of generosity that set the tone for an entire day spent chasing the real-world roots of Disney’s live-action Moana across one of the most cinematically charged islands on Earth. For anyone who has ever wondered how a fictional Polynesian story gets made with cultural weight intact, the answer starts here, on the ground, in the rain, with coconuts.
What Dwayne Johnson had to do to fit the role
Johnson met Khare on Oahu with the kind of relaxed energy that only comes from someone genuinely at home in a place. He had just come off a film where he was carrying roughly 50 pounds more than his usual frame, and he walked straight from that production into Moana, which he said made the physical fit convenient. The prep was still hard, he acknowledged, but playing Maui is personal. His lineage traces back to Samoa, the same cultural bloodline that Moana’s choreographer Tiana deliberately drew from when she shaped the character’s movements for the film. For Johnson, getting it right was not just a performance goal. He wanted community members to watch and feel recognized.
He sent Khare off with fresh coconuts for island hydration, the malasadas, and a specific recommendation: head to Kualoa Ranch, find the pond he had fished in, and look for what everyone on set had taken to calling Maui’s boat. ‘Dwayne’s boat, DJ’s boat, The Rock’s boat, Maui’s boat,’ he said, laughing. ‘I got a lot of nicknames.’
Catherine Laga’aia on sailing, rain, and the sister she called when nothing else made sense
Laga’aia, who plays Moana in the live-action film, was waiting at the agreed meeting point with the quiet confidence of someone who had already done the hard internal work of stepping into an iconic role. She grew up watching Auli’i Cravalho’s animated Moana, and she was candid about the weight of that. Cravalho, who served as an executive producer on the live-action production, came to set several times during filming. ‘I felt like I was almost performing for her in a really cool way,’ Laga’aia said. ‘It kind of got to be our thing.’
The physical preparation was extensive. She trained in traditional canoe sailing, learned knot tying, how to read sails and currents, and worked fully submerged underwater for certain sequences. When a cloud front rolled in during the Kualoa Ranch outing and the sky went grey, she did not treat it as an inconvenience. Standing on the land that inspired the story, she said, it was easier to imagine what Moana herself might have seen looking out at the horizon.
A hula lesson and the one instruction that mattered most
The day ended with choreographer Tiana walking Khare through the foundational movements of hula, with a small group of Moana dancers providing rhythm and company. Tiana had spent months on both the animated films and the live-action version, and she described the core intention simply: Polynesian dance pays homage to and mimics the elements. Hands moving upward and downward to mirror the ocean, hips tracking the calm water, a paddling sequence that crossed both sides of the body.
Laga’aia’s pre-lesson advice had been blunt and specific: bend your knees, and if you think you are bending them enough, you are not.
The boat at Kualoa Ranch
A traditional vessel sitting at Kualoa Ranch, the one Johnson had fished near and recommended by name, sits at the intersection of a film set and a real cultural artifact. Laga’aia stood beside it and said, simply, that it was now her boat.
The malasadas were gone by then, eaten somewhere between the coconut toast and the cloud cover rolling off the hills, leaving only a grease-spotted bag that had traveled from Leonard’s Bakery to the back of a road-trip car to a ranch where actual chickens, as both women noted, were absolutely still running loose.
