“I really wanted to bring out this roguish charm that he has in real life to the screen, and that’s not usually what directors ask of Jason,” Wan says of Momoa’s performance. “I honestly believe that when this film comes out people will not think of him just as a tough guy, but actually see him as a potential leading man or romantic lead in other genres. He’s got so many interesting sides to him.”

To do this, Arthur has to evolve from the character we were introduced to in Justice League. There, Arthur was a reluctant hero, one who performs relatively small-scale good deeds, like making sure an isolated fishing village has enough to eat in the frozen winter or saving fishermen in rough water – especially when there’s a bottle of whiskey waiting for him at the end of it. Despite Arthur’s initial reticence, Momoa brought a hint of exuberance to the role once the action started, giving the impression that Aquaman revelled in the chance to cut loose with his powers in a big fight against an alien army.

“We played him as the gruff hardass in Justice League,” Momoa says. “[In that movie], we don’t really know how he got to be that way, so I feel like now that we’ve done the solo movie, you really get to see where he came from, how his parents were treated and were separated, how he was raised, how he wasn’t accepted in Atlantis, how he wasn’t accepted on the land. I think you get a good vibe of what he was like, why he was the way he was in Justice League, and then you get to see him on his path to becoming the king and to believing in himself.”

Underwater action movies are nothing new in Hollywood, rare though they may be, but this is a profoundly different underwater epic than what we’ve seen in the past. Aquaman brings the legendary sunken kingdom of Atlantis and its remarkable inhabitants to life.

“There’s just no practicality to shooting humans underwater,” Safran says. “Atlanteans have to move with the same ease that we move with on land, and humans just can’t do that underwater so it’s almost always a situation where we shot dry.”