The live-action Moana trailer dropped on March 23, 2026, and most of the conversation was about the wig. But behind that wig is a genuinely brutal transformation story that Dwayne Johnson has been talking about all week.
40 Pounds, 2.5 Hours, and Five People With Fans
The prosthetics, the hair, the bodysuit. All of it together added 40 extra pounds to Johnson’s body every single day on set. The transformation took two and a half hours in the makeup chair each morning.
“The thing that became a challenge, that I had to work through very quickly, that I didn’t anticipate was the prosthetics and the hair and then the body. That is an additional 40 pounds on you,” Johnson told EW.
“There’s a freedom when you perform, whether it’s as an actor or singing. So that was an adjustment on how to actually work my emotions through the 40 pounds of prosthetics and hair and body that I had on me.“
The heat from the bodysuit made it worse. Between takes, Johnson had five or six crew members surrounding him with fans trying to cool him down. “Opening me up, pulling my hair back,” he said.
He also couldn’t lose weight before filming because of how the bodysuit works. Maui is a big guy, and the suit is built around that. “I couldn’t have a big bodysuit and then a small little skinny neck. Forty, 50 pounds is a lot to put on. Then it’s a lot to maintain for months,” he said.
He came into Moana at 282 pounds, straight off The Smashing Machine, where he’d already bulked up for that role. Director Thomas Kail said they discussed doing the transformation digitally at one point. They decided against it because there’s a “tactile emotional resonance when it’s a real bodysuit.“
The wig alone weighs seven pounds more when it’s wet, which it was a lot of the time, given how much of the film takes place on water.
The internet was not kind to the look when the trailer dropped. Johnson hasn’t addressed the criticism directly. He said making this film means something deeper for him.
“You realize that you’re representing cultures and people who came before you who were voyagers; they were warriors; they were slaves; in many cases, they had the language taken away,” he said.
Moana hits theaters July 10, 2026.
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