Jason Momoa Says No One Knew He Spoke English After Playing Khal Drogo on 'Game of Thrones'
In Season One of Game of Thrones, Jason Momoa played the towering warlord Khal Drogo—the chief of a Dothraki khalasar who weds a young Daenerys Targaryen. His is a lasting presence throughout the entirety of the series, even though Drogo dies at the end of the first season.
And, before he dies, Momoa's character only speaks a handful of English words throughout the series. In fact, there's a YouTube compilation of every English word Drogo speaks throughout Game of Thrones. The video is 20 seconds long. Drogo says "no" a couple of times, then says "You are no king ... a crown for king" when he ultimately kills Daenerys's brother Viserys. That's it! The rest of the season, Momoa is speaking Dothraki.
And it was hard for Momoa to shake that very popular image that Game of Thrones created of the actor. As Rachel Syme writes in Esquire's November cover story of Momoa:
“I’m not known for my acting,” he says. “I’m known for action. I don’t say a lot of things or use big sentences.” And then, adding air quotes, he says, “I’m not ‘very smart.’ ” At first, I take his modesty as a kind of aw-shucks bit. Sure, he’s known his share of flops—see: the 2011 remake of Conan the Barbarian—and he spent most of his twenties hustling his way into unremarkable roles, but his star has been on an inexorable rise ever since he landed, at thirty-one, a major part on the biggest prestige show of its generation. Then again, by his own admission, his role on Game of Thrones—Khal Drogo—didn’t exactly showcase the actor’s full range. “I mean, where do you put Drogo? He’s not going in a rom-com. No one even knew I spoke English.”
Of course, now Momoa has fully escaped that thanks to the massively popular Aquaman and the upcoming Apple series See. But you have to admit, Momoa did play a pretty damn convincing non-English speaker if he managed to make all of Hollywood think he really only spoke Dothraki.
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