Jason Momoa appears to dive off PNC Park in new Netflix movie ‘Sweet Girl’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Perhaps it would have been better not to ask Jason Momoa about the special effects work in a scene early in filmed-in-Pittsburgh Netflix movie “Sweet Girl” where his character, Ray Cooper, dives off the roof of PNC Park into the Allegheny River.

“I jumped off PNC Park, bro!” Momoa jokingly insisted earlier this month in a Zoom interview from London where he’s filming “Aquaman 2.” “I’m Aquaman, bro, you don’t think I can jump off PNC Park and jump in the water?”

Alas, “Sweet Girl” director Brian Andrew Mendoza confirmed the wide shot of the diving scene was created using computer-generated imagery.

“We built a replica of the rooftop on our stage and Jason jumped off that and then for the wider angle shot, that’s obviously CGI,” Mendoza said.

Momoa stars in the R-rated “Sweet Girl,” filmed in late 2019 and streaming Friday, as Ray Cooper, who vows revenge against a pharmaceutical company that pulls a cancer-fighting drug from the market. His wife (Adria Arjona) dies of cancer and Ray and daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) are soon on the run from an assassin after Ray tries to work with a reporter on an expose about the drug company.

Mendoza said the original “Sweet Girl” script called for a New York setting and initially the plan was for Pittsburgh to play New York. Mendoza said after his first trip to town to look at locations he opted to change the film’s setting to Pittsburgh because it made sense that a medical company would be based locally.

Although Mendoza said he only briefly considered and abandoned the idea of asking Momoa to affect a Pittsburgh accent, “Sweet Girl” doesn’t play geographical hopscotch as many movies do. A fight scene on a T light rail train begins at Gateway station and progresses logically to Steel Plaza and then First Avenue stations.

“I just wanted to have that be grounded,” Mendoza said via Zoom. “There’s no point in my mind of trying to make anything that was Pittsburgh not seem like actual Pittsburgh.”

The film’s theme of how family matters was mirrored in Mendoza’s own experience in Pittsburgh: His wife gave birth to their first child, a son, unexpectedly in Pittsburgh.

“We weren’t trying to induce or anything,” Mendoza said. “We finished our tech scout (a week before production started) and had three days of me not having to be anywhere and magically the clouds opened up and my son was born and then it was right back to work.”

Momoa, who said he ate breakfast most mornings at Kelly O’s Diner in The Strip near where he stayed for the film’s duration, felt “a lot of fire in my belly” after reading the “Sweet Girl” script.

“I’ve never went through any great tragedies,” Momoa said. “My very beautiful grandma’s still very alive and healthy and I’m thankful for that. … So being an actor and going through it I got to challenge myself and do some scenes I’ve never really had the chance to do before.”

That includes a scene where Ray breaks down in the hospital after his wife’s death.

“We’ll see what audiences think,” Momoa said. “It’s a good response if you can make your buddies cry. Then I did my job well.”

Mendoza stayed in Shadyside during filming and said he “just adored Pittsburgh.

“We wouldn’t have the movie that we have if it wasn’t for everybody in Pittsburgh being so welcoming of us,” he said, “from the film commission to the Port Authority to the police department. To be able to shoot on a live subway, then we closed down the bridge and closed down PNC Park. We flipped over an ambulance Downtown. Every time we were talking about stuff, and (we’re like), they’re gonna let us do that?”

Additional locations used in the film include the Carnegie Museum of Art, Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, Bellevue Suburban Hospital, North Park, the City-County Building, the Allegheny County Courthouse and the Roberto Clemente Bridge.

“I just think it’s beautiful the way it’s set around the river,” Momoa said of Pittsburgh. “I don’t like big cities and it’s probably one of my favorite landlocked cities I’ve ever been to. I was very welcomed and made lots of friends and I look forward to coming back.”

Mendoza said he hopes to shoot another movie in Pittsburgh at some point and he plans to bring his son back when he’s older to see the place he was born.

“Sweet Girl” ends with the potential for a sequel, which Mendoza said has been discussed in broad strokes.

“Pittsburgh is such a unique city,” he said. “I travel a lot and there (are) not a lot of cities where you go, ‘This has an identity.’ When you want to shoot something, when you want to tell a story, there’s nothing better than being able to have an identity to the location already that supports the story.”