Page 76 - Esquire (November 2019)

location details into the show; he suggested
that his character might navigate by splashing
through water and listening to the current.

MOMOA INVITES ME to the See wrap party
at the Parlour, a ritzy pizza place nearby. He
has rented out the back room for the cast and
crew, and he says I am welcome to tag along
and watch him “turn up.” We ride the ele-
vator down—it has been fixed, thank good-
ness—and pile into a black Suburban with a
few of his friends. He has changed into jeans
and a T-shirt that says HARLEY DAVIDSON
MUSEUM on it. He still has the pink velvet
scrunchie in his hair; he tells me it’s the same
one he brought to Karl Lagerfeld and Fendi
as an inspiration for the custom suit he wore
to last year’s Oscars.
During the ten-minute drive to the indus-
trial, gentrified waterfront neighborhood
Yaletown, he plays gregarious tour guide.
This is not the first time Momoa has shot in
Vancouver, though the last time he stayed
in the city, his life was entirely different. He
was twenty-seven and living in a dingy stu-
dio apartment down a back alley. He was a
regular on Stargate Atlantis, a Sci Fi Channel
potboiler about a military team that explores
the galaxy. He appeared in seventy-eight ep-
isodes. He didn’t love the work, he admits,
but it was a steady gig, and it became for him
a sort of ad hoc film school. “It was where I
learned how to shoot, how to write, how to
do it all. We made twenty-two episodes in
nine months. Day in, day out. The machine.”
He was splitting his time between Van-
couver and Los Angeles, where he was liv-
ing with his dream girl. Those are his words,
and he wants me to know he means it when
he says dream girl. Lisa Bonet was not just
a woman he’d met randomly one night at a
jazz club in L.A. She was “literally my child-
hood crush,” he says, blushing. When Momoa
blushes, a pink hue spreads quickly over his
bearded face, like a tropical sunset. “I mean, I
didn’t tell her that. I didn’t let her know I was
a stalker until after we had the kids.”
Momoa was in Canada, he says as we pull
up to the restaurant, which happens to be
across the street from his old apartment,
when he almost missed the birth of his first
child because he was asleep. He regales the
carpool with the tale. “It was the hottest
day, July 20,” he says, pointing at the second
floor of the shabby brown building where he
lived at the time. Bonet’s water broke early,
so he was not expecting to hear from her.
“There was no air-conditioning in these
places, so I was sleeping in the front window.
I missed about seventy calls. And I woke up
and freaked the fuck out.”
He is really getting (continued on page 112)