Dwayne Johnson lands dream role in Braveheart-style drama about Hawaii's King Kamehameha

By Sam Barsanti | August 29, 2018 | 7:18pm

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Dwayne Johnson is such an unstoppable superstar at this point that he can play whoever he wants to play, which is probably why Warner Bros. is letting him play a slightly obscure villain like Black Adam instead of a more traditionally popular hero, but now Johnson has finally landed a role he’s been pushing for since before he made movies. According to Deadline, he’ll be playing King Kamehameha in Robert Zemeckis’ The King, a movie that is said to be like a Hawaiian version of Braveheart.

Kamehameha is the man who united the Hawaiian islands into one kingdom, eventually giving the native Hawaiian people a better chance to hold their own against European invaders and making him an iconic, legendary figure in Hawaiian history. Deadline says Johnson has been talking about a desire to play Kamehameha since he first played the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns, but he decided to finally move forward with his dream project while filming Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle in Hawaii. Johnson’s team reached out to Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace, who put together a script on spec (because you don’t question it when The Rock asks you to write a movie for him), and then Zemeckis “jumped aboard quickly.”