Jonathan Michael Majors (born September 7, 1989) is an American actor. He first rose to prominence after starring in the independent feature film The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), and in 2020 garnered wider notice for starring in the HBO television series Lovecraft Country, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He has also portrayed Nat Love in the western The Harder They Fall (2021) and Jesse L. Brown in the war film Devotion (2022). Since 2021, he began starring in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as different versions of the character Kang the Conqueror. Early life Majors was born in Lompoc, California, and spent his early years living with his family—his mother, a pastor, and his older sister and younger brother—on the Vandenberg military base, due to his father being in the US Air Force. Majors said in 2020 that, "Our father, who loved us dearly, just kind of disappeared one day ... and he resurfaced 17 years later." Majors has since reconnected with his father. The family soon moved to Dallas, Texas. Majors subsequently lived in Georgetown, Texas, outside of Austin, Texas, and later grew up in Cedar Hill, Texas. After transferring from Cedar Hill High School, he graduated from Duncanville High School in 2008. Majors had a difficult childhood, growing up with recently-released criminals such as drug dealers or murderers for neighbors who wore ankle monitors. Due to his neighbours having both negative and positive values, Majors felt some moral complexity within them. As a teenager, Majors faced numerous struggles: he was arrested for shoplifting, suspended from high school for getting into a fight and at one point he lived in his car while working two jobs to make ends meet after being kicked out of his house. He eventually found a "safe space" in the world of theatre, where he found some solace and joined after watching Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, in which he felt Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker to resemble the criminals with moralistic dualities he grew up with for his complexity of good and evil, leading him to become an actor so he could inspire others like Ledger did to him. Majors studied for his bachelor's degree at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and later attended the Yale School of Drama; he graduated with an MFA degree in 2016. Career Majors secured his first