Joona Jasper Pääkkönen is a Finnish film actor and entrepreneur. Following a two-decade-plus career in Finnish movies, Pääkkönen’s international breakthrough role came in 2015 in the historical drama television series Vikings as Halfdan the Black.
Pääkkönen’s first film role was in The Glory and Misery of Human Life in 1988, when he was seven years old. He became famous as Saku Salin in the Finnish television soap opera Salatut elämät (1999–2002). According to a calculation published by the Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, Pääkkönen is “the most profitable film actor in Finland” for having starred in numerous box office hits during his career.
Where did Jasper Pääkkönen go to high school?
Already as a child, Pääkkönen was a theater assistant and attended Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts in Kallio, Helsinki. When Pääkkönen was 17, he spent a year in Maryland as an exchange student at Baltimore’s Owings Mills High School during the 1997–98 school year. Many of Pääkkönen’s films have made #1 at the Finnish box office, including Bad Boys, which is one of the most successful Finnish films at the national box office of all time.
