Not every actor’s first gig is as cool as this one.

Before Heroes, Masi Oka was a hero at Industrial Light & Magic: ‘We were creating a new technology to digitally drown George Clooney’

Not every actor's first gig is as cool as this one.

By Jordan Hoffman

on July 24, 2025 11:08PM EDT

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Masi Oka at an event in Los Angeles in 2024, George Clooney at an event in London in 2023. Credit:

Amy Sussman/Getty; Neil P. Mockford/Getty

When most performers talk about their first jobs, it's something like taking orders at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. But Masi Oka, star of *Heroes *and *Hawaii 5-0, *has to have one of the coolest right-out-of-college gigs on his resume.

As we were reminded when watching season 2 of *Light & Magic*, the Disney+ docuseries about the George Lucas-founded special effects company Industrial Light & Magic, young Oka graduated from Brown University with a degree in computer science and mathematics, then left Rhode Island for California to work at the cutting-edge cinematic sorcery emporium.

He got there at just the right time, too. The group was rolling up their sleeves for the *Star Wars *prequels, as well as creating new technologies for movies like* Twister *and *Galaxy Quest. *His first big job was as a digital artist on Wolfgang Petersen's high-seas adventure *The Perfect Storm — *the biggest "how are they gonna do that?" picture in Hollywood at the time.

Masi Oka at the premiere of 'Spies in Disguise' in 2019.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty

Speaking with director Joe Johnston, Oka explained the two most difficult things to simulate digitally at the time were human skin and water.

"How do you model water?" he asked. "Everything is viscous and changing and natural. You have air and temperature, everything affects water. We have to find a way to translate that into a digital world. This was my first big job."

The young man quickly made a name for himself at ILM when he came into work one day carrying, as others described it, a thick stack of papers. All that programming jargon explained how they could begin to do the heavy computer rendering on effects shots about 10 times as fast.

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"We were creating a new technology to digitally drown George Clooney,” he said of those adventuresome days. But that didn't mean things moved quickly.

Cutting to old video images of enormous computer data banks with names like "Jabba," "Ewok," and "Luke," Oka explained that the small waves weren't that tough — that's just a million or so particles that needed to be simulated. But the giant waves? That was more tricky.

"Sometimes it takes three days to render one frame — 90 days to get one second of waves, and you can't get it wrong," he explained.

George Clooney having a rough time of it in 'The Perfect Storm'.

ILM/Warner Bros.

The proof is still up there on the screen. Though 25 years old, the effects shots of the *Andrea Gail *splashing around in the North Atlantic looked pretty damn real in the *Light & Magic *clips. (Are we morons for never really thinking how this movie was made in the first place, and just figured they used a big tank? Yeah, we suppose so.)

Oka continued his work at ILM into the mid-2000s, rolling up his digital sleeves for projects like *Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines*, *War of the Worlds*, and *Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest*. Along the way, he continued booking acting gigs, like on *Scrubs *and *Reno 911! *

Oh no! Someone protect George Clooney from all that computer-generated water.

CLAUDETTE BARIUS/Warner Bros.

Eventually, though, came the role of Hiro Nakamura on *Heroes*, which led to a definitive switch in careers.****

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If it's been a while since you've seen George Clooney bark "that's where the fish are!" take another look at the *The Perfect Storm *trailer — loaded with Masi Oka's water particles — below.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Movies”