Jason Momoa needs to break out of his bro-y shell

Pop quiz: you’re a casting director tasked with hiring the perfect actor to play a rough and tumble antihero, a begrudging protector and wise*ss with a mean right hook for the blockbuster currently on your docket. Who’s the first person you call? Technically, there are no wrong answers here, but there is seemingly only one right one, which means that any other suggestions are strictly wrong by default. The bummer reality is, if your movie has any characters that fit those profiles, odds are you’re ringing Jason Momoa first.

As typecasting goes, Momoa’s is fine once in a while, but completely worn out in 2026, when the movies have hit a wall figuring out what to do with his easygoing charisma and irrepressible warmth. Unlike officials elected to the highest offices in the land, it’s a plus that just about every Momoa performance gives the impression he’d be a fun guy to have a beer with. Typically, he’s the person having the absolute best time onscreen next to his co-stars, perhaps because making movies is awesome and Momoa tends awesome’s altar as if he’s a cardinal bishop in its clergy. There’s no getting around facts: he’s cool as hell, and that’s just the way it is—sort of.

From left, Jacob Batalon and Jason Momoa in "The Wrecking Crew."

Prime Video

Momoa’s 2026 is so stuffed as to be daunting, starting with January’s The Wrecking Crew, moving right along with last month’s release of Supergirl, and continuing into the fall and winter movie seasons with Street Fighter in October and Dune 3 in December. The year’s first half strikes a sharp contrast with the second. Obviously, nobody’s seen either Street Fighter or Dune 3 yet, but as they’re franchise pictures, Momoa’s roles in both are already known: he plays the green-skinned electric man-beast Blanka in the former, and a swordsman named “Hayt” in the latter. (Hint: his name isn’t Hayt. If you know, you know.) Meanwhile, The Wrecking Crew and Supergirl slot him as a character archetype that at this point he’s shouldered one too many times: the reluctant, smartalec savior.

For fairness’ sake, give Momoa an attaboy for his performance in Supergirl as Lobo, the Hot Topic bounty hunter-cum-antihero, famed as the last of his alien race and conceived of as parody: his co-creator, Keith Giffen, imagined the character in the 1980s as a dunk on grim-and-gritty tough guy superheroes like the Punisher and Wolverine. Death of the author is real, though, and Lobo’s fans wound up crowning him as the poster boy of that comic book model. There’s no wiggle room for Momoa to express nobility in the movie, much less empathy. He’s an inveterate *sshole who keeps his word to the letter, but not the spirit. Accepting his help is a nuclear option, except nowhere near as tidy.

Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista during the London leg of "The Wrecking Crew" promotional tour.

Photo by Andrew Timms, courtesy of Prime Video

But Lobo is the exception that proves the rule of Momoa’s recent role choices. In The Wrecking Crew, his character, detective Jonny Hale, cracks endless one-liners, butts heads with his estranged half-brother James (Dave Bautista); in the Aquaman and all related DCEU movies, he plays Arthur Curry, recalcitrant king of Atlantis, who accepts his crown to save his friends and only under threat from an ancient kraken (voiced by Julie Andrews); in Slumberland (2022) he plays Flip, a faun who smack-talks the film’s child protagonist (Marlow Barkley) and, in the end, helps her along her quest to wish her late father back to life. One gets the sense that producers and studio executives alike all have Momoa’s agent on speed dial when they need a body for this character outline.

Maybe they can only be blamed so much for the lack of imagination. For as good as he is across the board as an actor, Momoa has particular facility with playing apathetic heroes who, given enough nudging, answer the call. He’s been doing that bit for years, and not just in blockbusters. In Ana-Lily Amirpour’s 2015 sophomore film The Bad Batch, for instance, his character, Miami Man, meets that criteria, albeit with adjustments; for a merciless wasteland cannibal, Miami Man isn’t the worst person in the narrative. But he lacks the yee-haw bro down vibes Momoa emanates in roles from the late 2010s up to today. It took Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) to codify that trait as intrinsic to Momoa’s acting persona. Ever since, it seems, the movies look to him whenever they need a man who can kick your *ss but also would make a great snowboarding buddy.

Even productions that don’t explicitly need those traits tend to syphon them off of him, too. Duncan Idaho, swordmaster of House Atreides and incalculable bad*ss in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), hums with “dope older brother” energy, for instance—a quality that neither the movie nor the character require, but from which they both benefit all the same. There is, in other words, a time and a place for Momoa to be the coolest actor on screen. But it doesn’t have to be all the time, and it doesn’t have to be every place—or every film.