A kalo farmer from Kauaʻi with no acting credits landed the biggest role in Apple’s most expensive series ever, then told the writers he wouldn’t speak a word of English. Adland, take notes. B&T is on the ground at the World Indigenous Broadcasters Network conference in Sápmi.
Kaina Makua flew to Aotearoa in 2023 with a level of Hollywood experience best described as none.
Before he got on the plane he sent the show’s writer an email. Roughly: I will not be speaking English to anyone. So you can hire a translator, you can learn some Hawaiian, or you can stand there looking like a dummy trying to work it out.
He landed. Everyone thought he’d lost it.
“Three hundred people on set, learning my language,” Makua told the World Indigenous Broadcasters Network conference in Guovdageaidnu-Kautokeino this week. “My way.”
The show is Chief of War, Apple TV+’s nine-part epic on the unification of the Hawaiian Islands, reportedly made for around US$340 million. That’s roughly $37.8 million an episode, Apple’s biggest per-episode spend to date, with a Hans Zimmer and James Everingham score on top. Jason Momoa co-created it, executive produced it and stars as Kaʻiana. Makua plays Kamehameha, the king who united the islands.
He is, by trade, a taro farmer.
The world’s longest pitch
Momoa spotted him at a paddling regatta in Hanalei in 2019, took some photos, and told him he’d play Kamehameha one day. Makua assumed the man was full of it.
Three years later the call came. Makua said no. Momoa came to the farm. Makua said no again. Four visits, four nos.
On the fourth, Momoa spent eight hours in a loʻi — a wetland taro paddy — knee-deep in mud, hand-pounding kalo into poi for the first time in his life. A Hawaiian who’d never done it. He did it to get a yes.
“I’m a very stubborn person,” Makua said, in what the room recognised as the understatement of the session.
There’s a lesson in there for anyone who has ever tried to buy their way to authenticity with a media budget. The pitch that worked wasn’t a deck. It was a full day in the mud, on someone else’s land, on someone else’s terms.
He didn’t like the brand he was hired to embody
Here’s the part that should stop every strategist in the room.
Makua grew up on Kauaʻi, the one island Kamehameha never took by force. On Kauaʻi, Kamehameha isn’t a founding father. He’s the tyrant who came for you.
“Growing up, we only knew him as a tyrant,” Makua said. “Killing everybody, and wanting more, and more, and more.”
He took the role of a man his own island had spent two centuries resenting. And what changed his mind wasn’t a script note, it was his own CV. Makua runs Kumano I Ke Ala, a community organisation that puts 10,000 to 12,000 people a year through its farm and school programs. He’s a coach. A former teacher. A father of six.
“If you’re not a leader, you’re not going to understand his point of view,” he said. “He had to kill hundreds of thousands of his people to unite them, to prepare for something worse. At the time you must have seemed very crazy, and hated. But that’s leadership.”
Then the line that landed hardest: sometimes the right call is the one you get scrutinised for.
Language was chief
The stubbornness wasn’t ego. It was arithmetic.
Roughly 90 per cent of the Hawaiian population died in the century after contact, taking most of the native speakers with them. Makua puts the number of remaining first-language speakers at around 50. Revitalisation efforts have built a second-language community in the tens of thousands, but the original line is a rounding error.
So when a US$340 million production wants to tell that story, the language isn’t set dressing. It’s the whole asset.
Rather than fight the crew, Makua taught them. He made every introduction himself, in Hawaiian, until the vocabulary spread. He says it changed the temperature of the set: a Hollywood machine that felt, oddly, like home.
“Our language was chief on a Hollywood set. From a small little place like Hawaii. And everybody bought into it.”
There’s your cultural-fidelity business case, delivered without a single slide about brand purpose.
The bit adland should actually steal
Makua didn’t read or write properly until he was well into his teens. At 14 he had the literacy level of a second grader. In one year at college, he closed the gap entirely.
He credits work ethic, and he’s built his organisation around it. “You can learn anything in life. There’s YouTube University. But without the work ethic, it’s close to impossible.”
What he wants next is unglamorous and correct: not more roles for himself, but Hawaiian kids as writers, grips, sparkies and producers. Own the crew list and you own the story.
He also wants a word with the other side.
“I’d like to look in the eyes of colonisers and talk to them. Let them know how important this is. Not just for us. For them.”
Two words to take back to your next brief.
Be stubborn.
B&T travelled to Karasjok in northern Norway as part of the Australian delegation to the annual World Indigenous Broadcasters Network conference. Part one looked at how SBS’ Tanya Denning-Orman spent a year rebuilding the machinery. And part two touched on what the World’s Indigenous Broadcasters built in the Arctic.
