Temuera Morrison digs deep in his latest TV project Earth Oven

Temuera Morrison didn’t need time to think when he was asked to front Earth Oven, a new TV show by his friend and long-time collaborator film director Michael Jonathan.

“I said oh gee I love hāngī, that's a great idea, put me in,” Morrison told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

Morrison is known around the globe as Star Wars' Boba Fett, and locally as Shortland Street's Dr Ropata and Jake the Muss in Once Were Warriors.

But on Earth Oven, a documentary where he travels the globe in search of other cultures who use earth ovens for traditional cooking, he was playing himself.

“It is a little bit more of a vulnerable feeling because normally I have those characters to kind of hide behind.”

However, he loved connecting with people and their food culture, he says, and he saw strong connections to his own family hāngī.

“It just reminded me growing up back in Rotorua where we, as a Morrison family, would get together and eat, birthdays, occasions, weddings, 21st - we'd get together, eat and sing.”

In an episode filmed in Jordan, he realised earth oven techniques across the world have much in common.

“I think it's the 40-gallon drum that they use, and my uncle used to do a bit of preparation for his hāngī that way funnily enough.

“So, when I saw the drum concept over there, I said it reminded me of my uncle and his hāngi that he used to do every week and send out to all his mates.”

Filming Earth Oven revealed more similarities than differences, he says.

“That's what it really brought it home to me was man, these people [are] just like us at home.”

Curried sausages were about as spicy as it got for him growing up, so his visit to a Jordan spice market was an eye-opener, he says.

“It was like being in a James Bond movie or something you know, and I'm just talking to the guy who's showing me the spices and dipping his little spoon into the different kinds of spices.

“You know I've seen the Master Foods, the spices in New World, but oh there's nothing like this. Just seeing it all and smelling it all, man, it was just amazing.”

Morrison visits Jordan, Mexico, Hawaii, Chile and Australia in Earth Oven.

In Hawaii, he got the chance to learn about his acting colleague Kaina Makua’s work to revive traditional cooking techniques.

“The beautiful thing about him is he's reviving some of his ancestral ways.

“They're reviving what we call the taro, they call it over there kalo, he's reviving growing and teaching growing the taro and teaching his young people and it's very much a community effort too with whatever he does.”

In that episode, a whole pig cooked in an earth oven was a revelation, he says.

“I've never tasted pork like this. We put the pig in about 6pm at night through a lightning storm so that made it a bit more spectacular, and then we left the pig in there all day and all night so we took it out again at six o'clock the following night. That was a slow cook.”

The show brought home to him, he says, the important connection between food and people.

“We have a saying; what is the most important thing? He aha te mea nui o te ao? Māku e kī atu, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

“The people, it is people, he tangata, he tangata. And that saying really says what I was feeling that gee no matter where we are we're all just people at the end of the day.”

Earth Oven is showing on Sky Go and Neon.