Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa was born on August 1, 1979 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is the son of Coni (Lemke), a photographer, and Joseph Momoa, a painter. His father is of Hawaiian descent and his mother, who is from Iowa, is of mostly German ancestry. Jason was raised in Norwalk, Iowa by his mother. After high school, he moved to Hawaii where he landed a lead role out of thousands of hopefuls in the T.V. series, Alerte à Malibu (1989) (known as "Baywatch Hawaii" in its tenth season). When the show ended, he spent the next couple of years traveling around the world. In 2001, he moved to Los Angeles where he continued to pursue an acting career. In 2004, after the short-lived T.V. series North Shore: Hôtel du Pacifique (2004), he was cast as the popular character "Ronon Dex" in the T.V. series Stargate: Atlantis (2004), which achieved a cult-like following. In 2010, he appeared in the Emmy-nominated H.B.O. series Game of Thrones (2011) playing the Dothraki King, "Khal Drogo". To illustrate to the producers he was Khal Drogo, he performed the Haka, a traditional war dance of the Maori of New Zealand. The audition was with the same casting director who was casting the titular role in the reboot of Conan (2011). Four weeks after he was cast as the popular Robert E. Howard character, he began shooting in Bulgaria. His approach, like the film-makers, was to pull from the eight decades of comics and stories as well as the Frank Frazetta images rather than the hugely popular 1982 movie. Jason has a production company, "Pride of Gypsies", in which he is expanding his career from actor to filmmaker. He has directed a couple of short films and is working on his feature film debut "Road to Paloma" which is pulled from a series of stories he's been developing over the years which he calls the Brown Bag Diaries: Ridin' the Blinds in B Minor (2010). Jason lives with actress Lisa Bonet with whom he has two children: Lola and Nakoa-Wolf.
