The Secrets of Jason Momoa and Lisa Bonet’s Epic Love Story

Jason Momoa might have burst into our consciousness taking part in a forbidding, ruthless, shirt-averse warrior on Game of Thrones, however in actual life…

Unlike Khal Drogo, Momoa was already a completely domesticated household man, devoted to the girl in his life and their kids, no taming vital. Though he nonetheless tends to skip the shirt once in a while.

But such is the best way for the actor, who hails from Honolulu and whose first main TV function was on Baywatch. Seriously, what’s a “shirt”?

“It’s more comfortable for me,” Momoa quipped to E! News at Comic-Con final month.

And although his lack of availability may need crushed just a few GoT followers who thought they have been discovering some new untapped supply of hopes and goals, the truth is so aw-worthy, the frustration proved fleeting. Momoa, who’s celebrating his 39th birthday Wednesday, has been fortunately squared away with Lisa Bonet since 2005—and their love story, whereas below the radar for years, is epic. Sun and stars, moon of my life, the entire manufacturing.

Though Bonet was incessantly known as his spouse beforehand, and Momoa by no means made any effort to right the belief, the couple truly simply acquired legally married final October, quietly swapping vows on the Topanga, Calif., dwelling they share with their daughter, Lola Iolani Momoa, and son, Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa, in addition to many animals and no tv.

But these two return. Or at the least Momoa does. Way, means again.

“Ever since I was 8 years old and I saw her on TV, I was like, ‘Mommy, I want that one!'” Momoa shared on The Late Late Show final yr, revealing that his crush on Bonet blossomed when she was on The Cosby Show. “I’m like, ‘I’m going to stalk you for the rest of my life and I’m going to get you.’ I am a full-fledged stalker. I didn’t tell her that until we had two babies—otherwise, I’d be creepy and weird. I’ve always wanted to meet her. She was a queen, always.”

When he was about 26 and simply starting what could be a four-season run on Stargate: Atlantis, destiny introduced them collectively one night time on the identical L.A. jazz membership.

“We just happened to be at the right place, right time, mutual friends,” Momoa mentioned. “I actually had dreaded my hair almost for her.” Like, by coincidence?

“I had huge dreadlocks, she had dreadlocks. I literally turned around, I was with my best friend, and I see her and I’m just like”—he paused, recalling the wrestle to maintain a straight, chill face. “She goes, you know, ‘I’m Lisa.’ I was like, I turned around to my friend and was like, [teen girl shriek of excitement]. I had f–king fireworks going off inside me, man!”

He did not have a automotive, so, “I convinced her to take me home, ’cause I was living in a hotel.” But first they stopped on the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, the place Bonet ordered a Guinness—which occurs to be Momoa’s favourite.

“That was it,” he mentioned. “We had Guinness and grits and, you know, the rest is history.”

Of course, slightly little bit of historical past preceded Momoa’s arrival in Bonet’s life. 

The actress and mannequin can also be mother to Zoë Kravitz, her daughter with ex-husband Lenny Kravitz, whom Bonet met at a live performance in 1986 when she was 19, eloped to Las Vegas with in 1987 and welcomed daughter Zoë Kravitz with in 1988.

“One day I turned around and I looked at him and I knew, that was my man,” Bonet mentioned on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1989.  

“Zoë’s mom and I were incredibly and deeply in love. It was a magical relationship and magical time in my life,” Kravitz mentioned in 2013 on Oprah’s Master Class. “She really helped to bring out the best in me and inspired me. We were very young and it was wonderful and we had Zoë. I see now what it was all about. It was really all about bringing this beautiful, child to the planet and also sharing the love that we had.”

Which is nice, as a result of in any other case it could’ve been about whirlwind romance and heartbreak.

“We were too young, we were babies,” Kravitz additionally recalled. “Our marriage was not based on reality.”

Bonet’s unraveling marriage, fueled by Kravitz’s rock-star methods run amok, coincided together with her exiting The Cosby Show in 1991—when Bonet’s character Denise and her husband Martin (Joseph C. Phillips) went overseas, leaving Olivia (Raven-Symoné) with grandparents Cliff and Claire and the remainder of the Huxtable household in New York.

They did not finalize the divorce till 1993, however an April 21, 1991, New York Times review of Kravitz’s album Mama Said talked about that he “recently broke up with his wife.” The observe “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over,” the artist’s first prime 10 hit, was one of many songs on the album impressed by Bonet, written when Kravitz was within the throes of getting second ideas about splitting up for good.

“That’s life, that’s love, it’s reality, it’s relationships,” Kravitz said on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1991 when the album was model new. “As long as we’re living and breathing, you don’t know what the next move’s gonna be.”

He remembered on VH1’s Behind the Music in 1999, “That album was a big haze, man, ’cause Lisa and I had split, and it was a very heavy time.”

After their cut up, Bonet modified her title to Lilakoi Moon. (There was a hard-to-shake rumor floating round for years that she then had a secret child with her yoga teacher boyfriend Bryan Kest, however that was finally debunked about 11 years in the past.)

“My heart was blown open from just loving someone so much,” Bonet told Vibe in 1999. “It also deepened my desire to heal myself—you know, not wanting to pass on the less-than-positive ‘family heirlooms’ that get passed down. I can honestly say it accelerated my growth and my desire to be here and to participate in a loving, conscious way on this planet.”

She had just lately filmed small however compelling roles within the films Enemy of the State and High Fidelity, and he or she did not sound involved about turning into much less well-known than she was within the 1980s. “There’s not a lot out there, and what is out there has to be really interesting to make me want to leave my life, which is really precious to me,” Bonet mentioned. “My desire to participate in the business is not to make more crap so I’m really content. I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love – but I don’t feel desperate. I mean, for me it’s not about creating or building a career anymore, you know?”

Talking to Net-a-Porter’s Porter journal earlier this yr, Bonet once more referred to breakup grief as an undesirable “heirloom.” She remembered going by “a very accelerated time, spiritually and intellectually,” as a result of she did not need to move the “fresh wound of a divorce” onto her daughter.

“I think there are probably times when these thresholds can either sink you,” Bonet mentioned, “or you can see who you are and rise and dust yourself off.”

When she was 11, Zoë went to stay together with her dad in Miami full time—which was fodder for tabloids however which Zoe described to Complex years later as her mom wanting “to give me an opportunity to be a normal kid.”

With their little woman now a grown-up actress and singer who stars in HBO’s critically acclaimed Big Little Lies (together with her dad’s ex-girlfriend Nicole Kidman), Bonet and Kravitz have lengthy since made amends.

“Zoë’s mom and I now are best friends,” Kravitz mentioned on Master Class. “It’s interesting because that’s how the relationship started. But it makes you feel really good when you can do that. When we’re all together now—her man, her kids, Zoë, me—we’re all together and we’re one big, happy family. It’s beautiful and it just shows you what can be done.”

“Her man” being, in fact, Jason Momoa, who can also be shut with Zoë and was just lately all aglow with Instagram-pride over his stepdaughter’s flip within the upcoming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and he instructed E! News at Comic-Con that she was “amazing” in Big Little Lies.

“My dad and my step-dad get along really well, and my dad loves and is close with my [step]brother and sister. It’s really beautiful,” Zoë told Ocean Drive in 2015. “As long as everyone can be in the same room together, and have love for each other, it’s totally healthy.”

“It’s full-on family love,” Bonet echoed the sentiment, nonetheless going robust a number of years later, in Porter.

While he was doing press at Comic-Con final month, Momoa was sporting an enormous turquoise necklace, an actual assertion piece that he mentioned was a marriage current from Bonet.

“I can’t say it was full-on from the moment we saw each other, but we have been together from the day that we met,” Bonet instructed Porter. Recalling their well-known first impromptu date over Guinness and grits, she mentioned, “In that moment, love came and it came big, and he did not run as I think a lot of men do. He basically picked me up and threw me over his shoulder, caveman style!”

In 2008, Bonet returned to TV within the short-lived Life on Mars, and he or she credited Momoa with serving to her put together emotionally to get again within the recreation.

“To have my face reinstated in minds and homes once a week was an intense decision,” she told People. “I’m a shy person. I don’t know if it’s in my DNA to share with the world…Having a mate has given me that feeling of safety. Jason is the love of my life. He’s everything I hoped would come.”

Like Kravitz, Momoa wasn’t a giant star when she first met him—however thus far, so good since his title has develop into extra of the family selection.

“What’s cool about Jason is that he’s an alpha male who stands for love and family,” Bonet instructed Porter. “And to circle back to my own wounds, having an absent father, then to be fully met by a man of that stature, is really incredible. Jason embodies a rare form of masculinity in this day and age—he’s a leader; he’s generous. Just in terms of charisma, physique, the right use of power, responsibility, work ethic, you can go down the line.”

That work ethic helped lead him from Baywatch and Star Trek: Atlantis to starring in a reboot of Conan the Barbarian and turning into one of the vital iconic Game of Throne characters regardless of solely surviving for a season.

Chatting with Conan O’Brienabout taking part in the hyper-aggressive Khal Drogo on GoT, Momoa quipped, “I tried it on my wife, it didn’t work that way.” He did get to name the pictures, nonetheless, on the set of his 2014 ardour challenge Road to Paloma, a revenge drama he wrote, directed and starred in, and by which he shared a romantic scene with Bonet, who was showing in her first film in virtually a decade.

“That was a motherf–ker,” Momoa told Collider in 2014, referring to the love scene within the movie. “It was a very hard scene to shoot. She didn’t think so, but it was. It was effortless and we got it in 15 minutes, but it was like trying to capture the first time we met, and yet have it be three times that. It was all the things we weren’t saying, and we had to capture it in the perfect light. I didn’t want to reshoot it.  It’s hard to get those real, true, beautiful moments.”

“That was a lot of years of our life that went into that film,” Bonet mentioned throughout a lunch at Sundance in 2014, based on Zap2It.  

“[The role] required me to be very shy—she makes me shy and…she’s the only one that can really do that,” Momoa additionally instructed E! News on the time. “I just don’t want to suck in front of my wife. I don’t want to be bad,” he added, smiling. “I want her to like me and love me and continue to do that.”

That collaboration then led to them each starring within the Sundance collection The Red Road. Momoa had the law-and-disorder collection lined up, and after they submitted Road to Paloma to the Sundance Film Festival, the present’s government producer approached Bonet to play a lawyer on the present.

“We looked at it and it was completely opposite of what we had just played,” Momoa instructed Collider. “We never thought we’d work together again. It wasn’t like I said, I’m only doing this with my wife.’ But, it was great because it’s the opposite of what we played in the movie. And she really dug it and wanted to do it. It’s definitely fun, working across from your partner.”

Pressed additional, he quipped, “It’s all right.” Then, extra severely, “No, it’s an honor [working with Bonet]. In this business, we have to travel so far away from our families. We have two children, so if we can work together, that’s awesome. Before I met her, it was a dream to work with her.”

Bonet instructed Zap2It, “[The network was] like, ‘We don’t normally like husbands and wives working together,’ but they really enjoyed our chemistries, so it was super flattering too.”

Since then, Bonet has appeared on Girls and Ray Donovan, and Momoa starred within the Netflix collection Frontier and joined the DC Universe. He’s now top-lining his personal superhero film, Aquaman, which is due out Dec. 21. And whereas over time Bonet has stayed eerily similar-looking to her 19-year-old Cosby Show self, Momoa has added what seems to be like a complete additional musculature to what was an already chiseled body.

His now 50-inch chest and 19-inch biceps took form because of intense weight lifting (for bulk) and cardio (for definition), however the man continues to be going to take pleasure in his pints of Guinness.

Again recalling that magical second when Bonet ordered his favourite beer, he gushed to Men’s Health this yr, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m with a woman who ordered
 a Guinness. I love her.’ When I got to know her, she was the woman of my dreams.”

He additionally remarked, when the topic of too many beers got here up, “I think I’d be in a whole worse place if I didn’t have a beautiful wife and children. I’m very thankful for my family. They keep me in the sky but they also keep me grounded.”

Daughter Lola, 11, was born in July 2007 and son Nakoa-Wolf adopted in December 2008. Bonet says that Momoa has urged they relocate to his native Hawaii or someplace even additional away, like New Zealand, however she instructed Porter that, whereas the concept of Costa Rica intrigues her, she’s “not quite ready to disappear completely!”

“When I’m by myself, I’m really cool and nice to everyone, but then the whole paparazzi thing? If you see me with my kids, I change,” Momoa told Esquire final yr. “I simply need them to not cope with that. I’m simply Papa to them. We do not watch TV. We have not even seen Star Wars but.” When he shot Aquaman in Australia for six months, the entire household went with him.

While nonetheless based mostly in La La Land, Momoa makes certain the youngsters get loads of out of doors time, mountaineering, tenting, fishing, paddleboarding and skateboarding among the many actions they have been as much as this summer season. And although selling Aquaman is barely going to take up extra of the actor’s time because the yr goes on, he and Bonet steal away for grownup time too. In April they have been in San Francisco for a Cartier-hosted party with the likes of Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba, Jake Gyllenhaal, Aaron Paul and Bonet’s Ray Donovan co-star Liev Schreiber.

Asked on the Justice League premiere in November in the event that they felt like newlyweds, the just lately married Momoa grew mock-deadly critical, as Bonet burst into giggles, and informed E! News, “Oh, yeah. If I weren’t on digital camera proper now, I’d let you know.” He cocked an eyebrow. “But oh yeah. Seriously. Big time.”

Always a good suggestion, to verify your spouse has a smile on her face.

Bonet mentioned that, whereas she had already considered him as her husband, she did really feel completely different now that she was formally married. “Definitely,” Momoa agreed. “I never thought I would but…I plan on being with her for the rest of my life. But it’s just that moment where,” he gestured taking it up a notch, “let’s go to the next level. ‘I’ll be here your whole life.'”