Luciane Buchanan had the audacity to show up to her own birthday doing a press junket for nine hours and then heading straight into a 3,000-person premiere. “There are worse ways,” she grins. She’s not wrong. Her latest role has her playing the queen in Chief of War, Jason Momoa’s new blood-and-sand epic for Apple TV+. Set in pre-colonial Hawaii, the series follows Momoa’s character Kamehameha as he attempts to unify the islands before the white men inevitably show up and ruin everything. As history tends to go.
But it’s Buchanan’s character—Queen Kaʻahumanu—who actually does the unifying. And no, there’s not much footage to work off of. “I couldn’t just jump on YouTube,” she says. “Google only gives you so much.”
So, like any good Kiwi with a Jeep Wrangler and no sense of direction, she drove three hours on the Road to Hana—think cliffside chaos and blind curves—for what she calls a “spiritual moment.” The cave where the actual Kaʻahumanu was born, somewhere near Hana, supposedly existed. She saw a picture once. Never found the webpage again. “I thought I made it up,” she says. “I was like, was that a dream? Did I just invent this cave?”
She didn’t. After being waved around by locals who gave her vague directions like, “maybe down there,” she finally found it by accident. “I just said, you know what? I’m going for a swim.” Ten minutes later, boom. Cave.
“I took off my shoes, set my intentions,” she recalls. “I told her spirit, ‘I might not be the right person, maybe not the last person, but I’ll try my best to honor you.’” Cue the sudden gust of wind. Trees shaking. “I thought, oh no, this is a bad sign. I’m the wrong person.” Then silence. A moment. An eerie calm.
“I use that as an anchor point,” she says. “Whenever things got chaotic on set—schedules changing, storylines changing—I just went back to that moment.”
The queen she plays was the favorite wife of King Kamehameha, though “wife” barely covers it. According to the explorer George Vancouver’s journals, she was also the beauty of the islands. That’s about all the books had to offer. Buchanan went deeper—local libraries, historical sites, oral accounts. “It was frustrating,” she says. “She’s so important, and there’s only, like, three pages on her.”
And then there’s the language. Most of the first two episodes are in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i—the native Hawaiian language that’s only recently been revived through immersion schools. “It’s endangered,” she explains. “There was a lot of pressure. Not to get it right, because even within Hawai‘i there are multiple ways of speaking it—but to respect it.”
Learning lines in another language is one thing. Delivering an emotional performance in a language you don’t speak? “You can’t ad-lib in Hawaiian,” she laughs. “You can’t make it up. You forget a line, you're just screwed.”
But Buchanan liked that challenge. “I was like, okay, I can act in another language. Noted.”
It’s not her first time grappling with language and identity either. In fact, she made a short film about it. Mother Tongue, which she wrote back in university while studying psychology—because apparently being a speech therapist was her backup plan if acting didn’t pan out—was about not knowing her native Tongan. “The class was looking for people who spoke their mother tongues. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that!’ And then realized... I only speak English.”
So of course, life being what it is, she ends up booked on a series requiring her to speak Hawaiian. “It’s funny how it worked out,” she laughs. “I wrote a short film about not speaking my language. Then booked a show where I had to speak another one.”
As for the acting part, she’s good. Too good, even. “I’m too critical,” she says, waving away the praise. But those looks—the ones she throws on screen, the ones that say more in silence than ten lines of dialogue—are undeniable.
Jason Momoa, her scene partner and showrunner, presented a different sort of challenge. Namely, he’s 6’4 and she’s 5’2. “A lot of apple boxes,” she says. “Like, a lot. Which you might notice. Or maybe not. We tried.”
Still, working with Momoa was “so fun.” The entire production, in fact, felt rare. “When the audition came through, I couldn’t believe it was real,” she says. “Jason’s making this? Apple is funding a Polynesian historical drama? It felt surreal.”
She earned her role the hard way—research, road trips, language immersion, and spiritual cave blessings. “I might not be the last person to tell her story,” she says of Kaʻahumanu, “but I’m so grateful I got to be one of them.”
And then, of course, she had to go do press for eight hours. On her birthday.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
