Essential Magazine January 2022

Page 76

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WAY TO GO,

MOMOA

You need only look at the wild beard, unkempt hair and rugged dress code – which often suggests the 42-year-old actor has been shopping in the Wild West – to surmise that Jason Momoa takes a largely rugged approach towards fitness, nutrition, health and wellbeing… and you’d be right.

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xcept, it wasn’t always that way for the bulked up Hawaiian who notes Conan the Barbarian, The Bad Batch and Sugar Mountain as some of his biggest lifts on the big screen. As a teenager appearing in Baywatch: Hawaii around the turn of the Millennium, Momoa was toned, of course, but also waxed, preened and coiffured to within an inch of his muscular frame. “I do look back on those early projects, and sure, they make me reel a little,” he begins. “That feels like a very different version of me now – it was back in the times when, dare I say it, fitness much more focused on image, and how others viewed me, rather than it being something for myself. It was a kind of ice-breaker. I was one of those guys who put it

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out there and took it on. “These days, I’m doing it strictly for me.” Momoa’s shift in personal perception came around the time he met Lisa Bonet. The couple finally married in 2017, 12 years after meeting, and have two children together. “When I relaxed, emotionally, I had a real desire to build authentic strength, not the sort of thing that looks good on the set of Baywatch,” he says. “It is very difficult for me now to have the motivation or enthusiasm to work out for vanity reasons. Instead, what I found I was looking for was something that I could feel coming from deep inside, like a very raw, almost cannibalistic instinct to building real warrior power, and to protect those around me.” ›

“My routines aren’t set, but my mindset is – I am constantly good at working hard and doing what I need to do. Rockclimbing is there because that helps me stay sane, always,” he says. “It gives me such a release because I need to be so switched on to strength, problem-solving, danger and stamina”


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