Why Jason Momoa’s dreads still come up in every loc conversation
If you have ever scrolled through “celebrity dreadlocks” on a beauty forum, Jason Momoa dreads sit near the top of the list. The funny thing is, he has not had real dreadlocks for years, and yet the look still defines how millions of people picture him. We dug through old set interviews, network drama, and his 2022 head-shave to trace what actually happened with his hair, from a low-budget sci-fi role to one of the most photographed manes in Hollywood. This is the real story behind the locs, the five-pound wig, and what his head looks like today.
Stargate Atlantis and the birth of Ronon’s locs (2008)
The dreads were never a personal hairstyle first. They were a casting decision. When Momoa joined Stargate Atlantis as Ronon Dex in 2008, he wanted to leave behind his Baywatch image, and he told producers he was going to grow his hair into locs to play the character rougher. In interviews, he put it bluntly: he did not want to be cast as the pretty boy anymore, so he started locking his hair on his own time. His texture, thick with some natural wave, took to the style quickly.
Here is the part most fans forget. The Sci-Fi channel originally said no. Network executives did not want a lead alien warrior with a hairstyle that, at the time, they thought would alienate American viewers. Momoa pushed back and kept the locs. Within one season they had become the show’s most recognizable visual element, the same kind of single-feature stardom that, years later, would echo through his Khal Drogo and Aquaman roles. If you want the broader story of where that hairstyle came from culturally, our piece on the true origin of dreadlocks covers Kenya, Mau Mau, and the Rasta lineage that predates any Hollywood casting decision.
The seven-year era: five pounds of hair and constant whiplash
For roughly seven years Momoa lived inside those locs. Stargate Atlantis ended in 2009, then came a steady run of action roles, then Game of Thrones in 2011 where Khal Drogo wore braided extensions over the same base hair. By 2013 the locs were so dense that he openly described whipping himself in the neck during fight choreography. Crew members on Stargate had already flagged that the hair weighed about five pounds at its peak, and the show’s stunt department had to plan around it the same way they would for a costume piece.
Maintenance was not glamorous. He has talked about washing the locs only when they truly needed it, mostly with diluted shampoo and a long drying time. He never used wax, which is the single most important detail for anyone trying to copy the look. His locs were closer to a semi-freeform style than to a clean, palm-rolled finish. They had texture, irregular thickness, and the kind of body that only shows up after months without retwisting. The longer history of that approach lines up with what we tracked in our Jay-Z freeform locs journey, where time and minimal interference do most of the styling work.
What started as a way to escape pretty-boy roles became Jason Momoa’s most lasting signature, then a five-pound liability, then a wig, then a shave for the ocean — and somehow still felt like him.
Cutting the locs, and the $10,000 wig that replaced them
Around the end of Stargate Atlantis’s fourth season, Momoa told producers he was ready to cut. He had been carrying that weight on his neck for years and the physical toll was real. The producers agreed. The network did not. After spending an entire fourth season trying to phase the locs out of merchandise, Sci-Fi flipped and refused to let Ronon appear on screen without them. The compromise was a custom wig that reportedly cost the production around ten thousand dollars and was built to match the same weight as his real hair so his head and neck movements would still look natural on camera.
After the show wrapped, Momoa let the locs fully grow out into long curls. That is the look most casual fans associate with him today, but it is not actually a dread. It is what locs become when you stop maintaining them and let the matting unwind into waves. By the time Aquaman started filming in 2017, his hair was officially in its curly phase, not its dread phase, and it stayed that way through the first film, Dune, and most of his red-carpet appearances.
September 2022: the shave heard around the loc community
On September 6, 2022, Momoa posted a video to Instagram in which he sat on a stool, lifted one of his long curls off his shoulder, and had it cut at the root. Then his entire head came off. He framed the cut as a statement about plastic pollution. In his words, he was tired of plastic bottles, plastic forks, and all the waste he was watching wash up on the Hawaiian shore. He used the moment to push aluminum-bottle alternatives through his company Mananalu, and the clip racked up more than seven million views within a week.
The reaction inside the locs community was split. Some people saw the cut as a loss of one of the most visible figures who happened to wear long natural hair on red carpets. Others read it differently. By that point his curls had not been real dreadlocks for nearly a decade, so the symbolic weight of the cut was less about loc identity and more about a celebrity choosing to use his own hair as a billboard. Either way, it ended the long-hair era cleanly and gave him a fresh public starting point.
What does Jason Momoa’s hair actually look like in 2026?
After the shave Momoa did not rush back to the long-hair look. Through 2023 he wore close crops, half-grown buzz styles, and the occasional small ponytail when the hair was long enough to gather. For A Minecraft Movie in 2025 he wore a mullet wig as part of the character design, and the wig itself became a meme. By the back half of 2025 his real hair had grown back into a long curly shape similar to his pre-shave Aquaman era, just without the dense matted ends he had during the Stargate years.
In 2026 he is mostly photographed with shoulder-length curls, sometimes pulled back, often loose. He has not gone back to real dreadlocks. If you study red-carpet photos closely you can see the texture: defined curls, no locking pattern, no congos, no signs of intentional matting. That matters because a lot of TikTok hair-routine videos still call his current look “locs,” which it is not. It is curly hair on the natural-to-loose end of the spectrum.
Can you actually get Jason Momoa’s dreadlocks?
Yes, but with realistic expectations. The Stargate-era Momoa look needs four things. First, hair length: at least eight to ten inches at the start, because his locs had body even early on. Second, texture compatibility: thick wavy or curly hair locks more naturally and matches the irregular shape of his locs. Straight, fine hair can still lock, but it will not give you that volume without backcombing and time. Third, a freeform or semi-freeform method: he did not retwist on a schedule, which is why his locs read so lived-in. Fourth, patience: the look you remember from season three of Stargate took roughly two and a half years from the day he started.
If you are starting now, expect a budding stage of three to six months where the hair clumps and frizzes, then a teen stage where the locs start to compress, then a mature stage from about eighteen months onward where they hang with weight. For maintenance, less is more in this style. Wash thoroughly every two weeks, dry completely to avoid mildew, separate at the roots with your fingers, and skip wax entirely. The deeper how-to of that semi-freeform approach is laid out in our J Cole freeform timeline, which uses the same low-intervention method Momoa drifted into.
The takeaway: locs are a chapter, not a costume
Jason Momoa’s hair journey is more interesting than the “celebrity with dreadlocks” framing usually allows. He grew real locs to push back against a casting box, lived inside them for seven years, replaced them with a wig when the network panicked, let them grow into curls, and eventually shaved everything off to make a public point about plastic. That arc is closer to how a lot of regular loc wearers actually experience their hair: as a phase of their life that holds different meanings at different ages. The fact that he does not currently have dreads does not erase that he had them, and it does not make the search for “Jason Momoa dreads” any less valid. It just means we are remembering a specific window of his career, one that genuinely shaped how Hollywood now casts long-haired men of color.
If you want the cultural and historical layer behind why long, locked hair carries weight in the first place, you can pair this with our timeline of how long Bob Marley grew his locs. Together they trace two very different paths to the same hairstyle, decades apart, from two men who used it as identity rather than fashion.
Did Jason Momoa really have dreadlocks?
Yes. He wore real, fully formed dreadlocks for about seven years while playing Ronon Dex on Stargate Atlantis, starting around 2008. They were so heavy and recognizable that Sci-Fi insisted his stylists rebuild the look between seasons when he tried other haircuts.
Are Jason Momoa’s locs part of his Hawaiian heritage?
Long hair carries deep meaning in Native Hawaiian and broader Polynesian cultures, but dreadlocks themselves are not a traditional Hawaiian hairstyle. Momoa’s locs were a personal choice that grew alongside his cultural pride, not a transplant of an ancestral practice.
