Hafthor Julius Bjornsson

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“I had no acting experience at all and in those years my English wasn’t even that good. Luckily, I had very few lines, but there was a lot of physical stuff to do. I was already watching the show when I heard the news that they wanted to see me and get me in for an audition. I thought it was some kind of prank, but it wasn’t.”

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Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is an Icelandic professional strongman and boxer, as well as actor, who was born on the 26th of November 1988 in Reykjavík, Iceland. As an actor, he is best known for his portrayal as Ser Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane in the hit HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones for five seasons. As a child, he worked in his family farm and lifted natural stones, hence was always big and strong from a young age. Björnsson’s imposing height of 205 cm (6.73 ft) is credited to his 203 cm (6.66 ft) father, Björn þor Reynisson, as well as his mother Ragnheiður Juliusdottir, who is also of very tall stature. Hafþór is also a polyglot, speaking fluent English, French, Swedish and Norwegian in addition to his mother tongue of Icelandic.

Björnsson is the first and only person to have won the Arnold Strongman Classic, the Europe's Strongest Man and the World's Strongest Man in the same calendar year. He holds numerous championship titles from multiple strength federations, including many world records. With thirty international competition wins, Björnsson is the third most decorated strongman in history behind Lithuania's Žydrūnas Savickas and Poland's Mariusz Pudzianowski, and due to his 'brute strength' and dominance in every known strongman event, analysts and strongman experts consider Hafþór to be the strongest man to have ever lived.

In his first major acting role, Hafþór was cast as Ser Gregor Clegane for the fourth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones in August 2013. He became the third person to depict the character after Conan Stevens and Ian Whyte, but the first actor to portray Clegane in more than one continuous season with his appearances in seasons four through eight. In 2018, Björnsson played Mongkut, the main villain in Kickboxer: Retaliation opposite Alain Moussi and Jean-Claude Van Damme in a story about a kickboxer who was sedated and taken to a prison in Bangkok, where he's forced to fight a giant for freedom. He then played Big John in the 2018 film Operation Ragnarok about a town in the south of Sweden isolated after a viral outbreak. The following year, Hafþór starred with Mike Tyson in the action film Pharaoh's War (2019), a story about an ex-military man leading a group of Egyptian refugees through the desert to protect them from a group of mercenaries. In 2022, he then played a minor role as Thorfinnr the Tooth-Gnasher in the fantasy epic The Northman, which starred Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke. Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe.