His passenger corrected him, again, modeling the subtle emphasis on the "u" sound: "Puali."
Momoa was preparing for his role in Chief of War, the first major TV series featuring the language and culture of Hawaii's Indigenous people.
His passenger, Kaho'okahi Kanuha, connected with Momoa years ago while they were both protesting against a giant telescope on a mountain summit held sacred by some Native Hawaiians. He wound up living with the Hawaiian Hollywood superstar for nearly a year as his personal language coach.
The word they kept working on during the drive can mean "warrior" or "army." It was one of many to get right.
Like many Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and elsewhere, Momoa didn't grow up speaking Hawaiian. Most of the other actors in the series also aren't fluent. They worked with coaches like Kanuha to pronounce the vowel-laden sounds. Kahuna was at Momoa's side 24/7, with a binder in hand of the actor's lines to practice any chance they had - while driving, eating, working out.
"My objective was to be able to get him to say his lines, deliver his lines in a way that wasn't distracting to the viewer," Kanuha said.
The final product of the Apple TV+ series that premiered in August isn't perfect, Kanuha and other Hawaiian language experts say, but it's a successful global-scale contribution to revitalising and normalising a language that has endured erasure attempts amid colonisation.
While the first two episodes are mostly in Hawaiian, the language is spoken less as the series progresses from 18th-century Hawaiian society before contact with Europeans to Momoa's character traveling beyond Hawaii.
An 1896 law, a few years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom by American business owners, dictated English as the medium of education, said Ka'iuokalani Damas, an assistant professor in Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
That resulted in a systemic devaluing of Hawaiian and forbidding children from speaking it, Damas said.
"We have lots of stories of students being beaten or made to haul boulders and rocks from one side of the school to the other," he said.
"Writing on the blackboard 500 times, 'I will not speak Hawaiian.'"
Momoa's language coach started learning Hawaiian as a second language in 1994 at an immersion preschool.
"It's not a language that my parents or my family spoke," Kanuha said.
"And so I learned as a kid that going through these programs ... can sometimes be a very lonely journey."
Now 36, Hawaiian is his primary language and the first language of his two young sons.
As a family, it can feel like they live in a Hawaiian bubble until they leave home and everything is mostly in English, he said. With the show, his children can enjoy entertainment in Hawaiian — when they're not closing their eyes during violent battle scenes.
"How ironic that being Hawaiian - in Hawaii - speaking Hawaiian makes you feel lonely," Kanuha said.
"I think this helps to kind of start to reverse that a little bit."
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