Jason Momoa won Khal Drogo by performing a Māori haka at his audition
Born in Honolulu and raised in small-town Iowa, Jason Momoa walked into a Baywatch audition at 19 and has barely left the screen since. He landed Game of Thrones' Khal Drogo after performing a haka, tried out for Batman and became Aquaman instead, and later led Chief of War on Apple TV.
Momoa was born on August 1, 1979, the only child of a Native Hawaiian painter and a photographer of German, Irish and Pawnee ancestry. His parents divorced soon after, and his mother took him to Norwalk, Iowa, where he grew up and played high-school soccer alongside the future actor Brandon Routh. In his early teens she introduced him to climbing at Custer State Park in South Dakota, among the granite Needles. He later studied at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
While working in Honolulu he auditioned for Baywatch Hawaii and played the lifeguard Jason Ioane from 1999 to 2001. Parts followed in the Fox drama North Shore and the comedy Johnson Family Vacation, and from 2005 to 2009 he played Ronon Dex in Stargate Atlantis, learning martial arts for the role. In 2011 he took on Conan the Barbarian, reimagining the part Arnold Schwarzenegger had made famous. The same year Game of Thrones cast him as the warlord Khal Drogo; his audition included a haka, one of the Māori dances used to issue a challenge or greet a visitor.
He has also worked behind the camera. He directed and co-wrote the thriller Road to Paloma, which premiered at the Sarasota Film Festival in 2014, and executive-produced Frontier, the Discovery series about the Canadian fur trade in the late 1700s, in which he starred as the part-Irish, part-Cree outlaw Declan Harp challenging the Hudson's Bay Company.
Aquaman arrived almost by accident: reports say Momoa had auditioned to play Bruce Wayne. He first appeared as Arthur Curry in a brief cameo in Batman v Superman in 2016, the character's live-action debut, then in Justice League and in 2018 his own Aquaman film. Later roles include Duncan Idaho in Dune, a part in Fast X, and A Minecraft Movie in 2025.
Source: Jason Momoa
