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After working with Hollywood heartthrob Jason Momoa on the 2016 film The Bad Batch, O’Rourke says in the galaxy of movie stars, Jason Momoa truly shines — a beautiful person, inside and out.
“You cannot find a bigger honey pie in the world,” says Eamon O’Rourke, who worked behind the scenes on The Bad Batch, starring Momoa, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, and Diego Luna. “The cast was absolutely stacked. I was running background but helping out with first team with another [production assistant] who I worked with forever. I was mainly running background, but I was also helping, a few of the bigger actors were sort of under my care. And one of the people who I was really helping out with was Jason Momoa, who is the nicest guy in the whole world.”
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, The Bad Batch is a mind-bending thriller centered on a young woman exiled to a desert where she’s attacked by cannibals. “It was [Amirpour’s] follow-up movie to A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,” O’Rourke adds.
Eamon O’Rourke: Jason Momoa Has ‘No Sense of Superiority’
Eamon O’Rourke says at 6 feet, 4 inches, Jason Momoa is gigantic and sort of intimidating to be in the presence of at first, but then the Hawaii-born hunk smiles and melts away any preconceived notions.
“[He is] just this wonderful, wonderful, superwarm guy who has no sense of superiority,” O’Rourke explains. “He’s part of the whole thing. Everyone is part of it too. It’s beautiful. Anyway, something that I have learned over the course of working on first team is that in the beginning, you’ve got to win the actors over in that first week. You don’t want to get too, too close, but you want them to like you. That can look a lot of different ways depending on the actors.”
O’Rourke, who began his career in theater in 2008 and transitioned to film in 2011, says some actors prefer to talk about what’s going on, while others prefer to be left alone. Toward the end of the first week of filming The Bad Batch, Eamon O’Rourke recalls hanging out in a small, cheap hotel with Momoa and other cast members.
“Jason Momoa was having some of the crew and people who were staying in that hotel to his room, [to] drink some beers [and] hang out,” Eamon O’Rourke says.
O’Rourke also recalls the crew playing games with Momoa in the off-hours of shooting. While a variety of people were challenging Momoa, no one could beat him, especially when it came to games involving physical strength and speed.
The determined director, who was working as a production assistant at the time, was eager to keep competing with Momoa. “[I was thinking] this is the moment to win this guy over, to get him on my side for the rest of production. This is it. You just can’t give up,” O’Rourke says.
Eamon O’Rourke says his plan worked. “Momoa is just such a nice guy who was great to me and took care of me over the course of that shoot,” he says. “It was a long shoot. It was a hard shoot. We were in the desert. I was his guy. I was his guy from that point on because I had never quit on him. I find it to be one of the most entertaining moments of my career as a [production assistant].”
Momoa is no stranger to making headlines for being an ultra kind celebrity. In 2020, CTV News reported Momoa visited a children’s hospital in Pittsburgh, posing for photos with tots and families there and even participating in a game of arm wrestling. The bighearted actor has also lent his time to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. CNN reports that the Aquaman superhero posted on social media that meeting with critically ill kids and working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation is something he plans to keep on doing. Momoa tweeted, “My first @makeawishamerica I will do this for life.”
Earlier this month, Momoa made the news again for demonstrating more benevolent behavior. The Daily Mail reported that a gentlemanly Momoa carried his co-star Hera Hilmar’s clutch handbag on the red carpet at the premiere of their Apple TV+ series, See. In the sci-fi series set in a post-apocalyptic future, Momoa’s character plays a father to gifted twins who are able to see after a deadly virus wipes out most of society, leaving all survivors blind.
Fun and Games On Set
Playing games with Momoa wasn’t the only behind-the-scenes shenanigans Eamon O’Rourke says he’s gotten up to over the years.
While filming the 2021 film Asking for It, starring Vanessa Hudgens and Alexandra Shipp, Hudgens told collider.com that after hair, makeup, and wardrobe, they’d pop into the bar across the street for karaoke nights.
“We would do karaoke while waiting to go on set in our full wardrobe and hair and makeup and have the most splendid time,” Hudgens says. “We knew everyone who worked there. It was a tiny town and people didn’t bother us. They loved having us and the town actually wrote an article in their newspaper about how we weren’t the standard Hollywood types and we were just so happy we left a good impression on them.”
Shipp told collider.com that she recalls moments singing karaoke while still in character and that it helped the cast dive even further into their roles.
Eamon O’Rourke also says he enjoys games in his downtime. He confesses that he loves playing chess and has been known to play video games during breaks in the action — and he has a genuine appreciation for Nintendo 64.
“I love all of the old-school games,” Eamon O’Rourke says. “I like to replay games that I used to play when I was a kid in the same way that I like to watch movies that I’m very familiar with a lot of the time. It provides me deep, nostalgic happiness. I also like newer games and think video games as they have advanced have become a very interesting form of interactive storytelling, and [I] hope to get an opportunity to explore the power of giving the audience agency over how a story gets told more in the future.”
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Photos provided with written permission from owner Eamon O’Rourke
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