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

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.”