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What You Don’t Know About David Bowie’s Son

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He spent his childhood known as “Zowie Bowie” — and spent the rest of his life trying to become just Duncan.

Duncan Jones grew up watching his father reinvent himself onstage as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. Offstage, though, David Bowie’s son was navigating divorce, a distant mother, a surrogate parent who wasn’t blood, and a nickname he never asked for. By the time he stepped out from under all of it to direct the 2009 sci-fi sleeper hit Moon, Jones had built a career almost nobody connected to his famous last name.

• Born Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones in 1971, he was nicknamed “Zowie Bowie” — the inspiration for Bowie’s 1971 song “Kooks” — before going by “Joey” and “Joe” as a preteen and reverting to Duncan around age 18.
• After his parents’ 1980 divorce, Bowie won full custody, and Jones was largely raised by his Scottish nanny, Marion Skene, whom he considered his surrogate mother; Skene died of cancer in March 2017.
• Jones directed the BAFTA-winning Moon (2009), followed by Source Code (2011), Warcraft (2016) and Mute (2018) — and he only ever showed his father finished cuts, including screening Warcraft for Bowie shortly before Bowie died of cancer in January 2016.

From “Kooks” to Just Duncan

The nickname stuck early. As a toddler, Jones was dubbed “Zowie Bowie” in the press, a name his father immortalized on Hunky Dory with the track “Kooks.” Jones never loved it. Around age 12 he started introducing himself as “Joey,” then “Joe” — the name he was still using in 1992 when he stood as best man at his father’s wedding to Iman. He didn’t go back to Duncan full-time until he was about 18, finally settling into the name the public would eventually associate with a director’s chair rather than a rock star’s kid.

A Fractured Family, a Surrogate Mother

When Bowie and Angie Bowie divorced in 1980, Bowie was awarded full custody — a rarity for the era. Jones grew increasingly estranged from his mother and, according to his own account, cut off contact with her entirely by age 13. The steady presence in his life instead was Marion Skene, his Scottish nanny, whom Jones has described as his real mother figure. Skene passed away from cancer in March 2017, just over a year after Bowie’s own death.

He didn’t let his father see a single frame of his films until they were finished — not even Warcraft, which Bowie watched only shortly before he died.

Finding Film After Philosophy

Jones didn’t start out chasing a camera. He studied philosophy first, spending time at a college in Ohio and then Vanderbilt University, before deciding to pivot toward filmmaking. He enrolled at the London International Film School and graduated in 2001, arriving with a self-described gamer’s sensibility — Jones is an avid tabletop and video gamer — that would later show up directly in his choice of projects, from the moody isolation of Moon to the full-scale fantasy spectacle of Warcraft.

Bowie was, by every account, deeply supportive of his son’s ambitions, but Jones drew a hard line: no early cuts, no work-in-progress screenings, ever. His father saw Moon, Source Code and eventually Warcraft only once they were locked — the Warcraft screening happening in the window before Bowie’s death from cancer in January 2016. Readers curious about how other famous parent-child dynamics have played out over the years can see similar patterns in the piece on celebrities whose closest relationships eventually soured.

A Wedding Day That Changed Everything

Jones married photographer Rodene Ronquillo on November 6, 2012, in a ceremony that came together suddenly — the same day Ronquillo was diagnosed with breast cancer. The couple pushed forward and built a family together: son Stenton David Jones, born in July 2016, and daughter Zowie Tala Mabsie Jones, born in April 2018, with Jones reclaiming the very nickname he’d spent his teenage years trying to shed. For more on how sudden life events have reshaped celebrity marriages, see the breakdown on Sandra Bullock’s relationship with Bryan Randall.

By the time Mute landed on Netflix in early 2018, Jones had spent nearly a decade proving Moon‘s BAFTA for Outstanding Debut wasn’t a fluke, all while raising two kids named after the father and the childhood nickname he’d once run from.