About seven minutes into my second conversation with the actor, writer, and director Taika Waititi, he confessed, somewhat abruptly, that he doesn’t like being around people. There was “absolutely nothing loaded” about the remark, he assured me—but he also seemed to mean it. “It’s just really draining,” he said. “With whoever—it doesn’t matter who. Even my family. But definitely people I’ve never met before.”
It was a hard claim to believe. Outwardly, Waititi can seem extroverted in the extreme. He’s goofy and antic, with an easygoing familiarity and a seemingly bottomless amount of energy. While filming, he’s known for keeping his sets lively: playing music, launching into bits of oddball comedy, and sometimes doing directorial “costume changes” where he vanishes and then reappears in a different outfit. Cate Blanchett once described the set of Thor: Ragnarok as “one long Mardi Gras parade.”
Like many performers, Waititi can be charming, but his default mode is sillier, in a way that feels obscurely flattering, like a private game you’ve been invited to join. He’s also instinctively good at reading people and slipping into whatever mode they find comfortable. In interviews, I tend to be anxious and earnest, and Waititi, in turn, became unusually calm and reflective. At the time, I thought this meant that I was seeing something closer to the “real” Taika: the person he becomes when he doesn’t feel obliged to be amusing. The more we talked, though, the more it became clear that Waititi wasn’t being especially real with me, or especially fake. Every person Waititi spends time with comes away feeling like they have a special connection. It’s a taxing feat. As Waititi observed at several points in our conversation, “I just want everyone to be happy.”
Waititi grew up in New Zealand—his father was Maori of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent, his mother Russian-Jewish—and spent his thirties making small, cultishly popular films. Two of these, Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, featured primarily Maori characters and actors and were set in poor, rural areas similar to where Waititi was raised. Both movies felt radical—the unfamiliar characters and situations, the startling mix of brutality and humor—but also sweetly affectionate, even loving. Waititi has said that he doesn’t make “Cannes-style films”: the kind of depressing dramas where, as he once put it, “everyone is a prostitute and they all die in the end.” But he also doesn’t make conventional comedies, with their two-dimensional characters and steady barrage of jokes. Instead, his movies are somewhere in between, or both at once—a sustained high-wire act where moods mix and shift in exhilarating ways. While dramatic movies tend to build slowly, in a single dark register, Waititi’s will often move abruptly from a slapstick moment to a tender or heart-rending one, with devastating effect.
In the six years since Wilderpeople, Waititi’s career has gone vertical. In 2016 he made Thor: Ragnarok, reinvigorating the stale franchise in part by poking fun at it. After that, he wrote, directed, and starred in the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit, about a lonely boy in Nazi Germany who has Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi, as his imaginary friend. Since then, Waititi has directed and acted in episodes of The Mandalorian, produced and costarred in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, played the tech-bro villain in Free Guy, and cocreated—the man works a lot—the FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs, an Atlanta-style mood piece about four teenage friends on a Muscogee reservation in Oklahoma that plays deliriously with Native American tropes while cutting deeply to the heart of dispossession and its effects.
This mercurial range—and chameleonic shifting of tone and sensibility—seems deeply rooted in Waititi himself. He’s someone who seeks out company and attention but quickly tires of both. He’s easily amused and yet, it seems, just as easily bored. In conversation, Waititi can be forthcoming—he admitted that he struggles to order in restaurants because he’s so worried about making the wrong choice—but also comes across as profoundly guarded; in general he dislikes talking about his feelings, even with friends, and has a tendency to pivot away from emotional topics, either changing the subject or turning detached and jokey. More than once, he told me that he doesn’t trust adults and has a particular dislike for authority, even as the director of formidably large and expensive movies—including this summer’s Ragnarok sequel, Thor: Love and Thunder, and a new Star Wars film, set for 2025.
Waititi has spent time in therapy, in part, he said, because he realized he needed to “decipher what I’m doing” as a writer and director. What’s trickier, though, is deciphering Waititi himself. He is now solidly into middle age (he’ll turn 47 this summer)—a time when mounting responsibilities tend to make life significantly less spontaneous and fun. Waititi still manages to be both, though he resents when people interpret his on-set hijinks as a sign that he’s just messing around, because, as he said, “I’m also really committed to work, and serious about work.” The result is a kind of tension: a restless toggling that feels both deliberate and, as with all of Waititi’s competing impulses, a little unsettling.
When i visited Waititi in Los Angeles this past February, he was just back from spending two months in Australia and New Zealand, where he had been working on scripts for several projects while spending time with his two young daughters, Te Kāinga o te Hinekāhu and Matewa Kiritapu. (He and Chelsea Wistanley are divorced, and his daughters spend most of the year in New Zealand.) Waititi is known for his snappy and eclectic style—in 2017 he wore a matching pink pineapple-print shirt and shorts set that was the talk of Comic-Con—but on the day we met, he was dressed casually in worn blue corduroy pants and a sea-green button-down shirt, plus an oversize gold-link necklace borrowed from his girlfriend, the singer Rita Ora.
Waititi is occasionally assumed to be queer—as he put it to me, “I come off as very gay”—partly because of his clothes, but also because the characters he plays often have an edge of camp. In Jojo Rabbit, Waititi’s Hitler veers between childish confidante, cheerful camp counselor, and dithering, slightly effeminate authority figure. In the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, which follows the daily lives of four vampires living in a shared house in a Wellington suburb, Waititi plays the 379-year-old Viago as a sweet-natured and fastidious dandy—a foil to the lecherous 862-year-old Vladislav, played by Jemaine Clement.
What We Do in the Shadows is Waititi’s most purely funny film. In it, we see the vampires turn into bats and feed on humans, but also bicker about household chores, ride the bus, make bad pottery, and fret insecurely about their social status. Released in 2014, the movie was Waititi’s third feature, and the first to develop a worldwide following, largely because of its loopy, earnest dialog. (Viago: “Yeah, some of our clothes are from victims. You might bite someone, and then you think, ‘Ooh, those are some nice pants!’”) But even that movie has a vein of melancholy. Viago pines over a lost love, while Vladislav obsesses about his archnemesis, the Beast, an all-powerful evil being who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend Pauline.
Waititi never went to film school, and his skills are largely self-taught. Unlike directors who meticulously study technical details like framing or the transitions between scenes, Waititi works more intuitively. Sometimes, he said, he will simply watch a rough cut of one of his own films and mark down all the places where he feels embarrassed. But he’s also exacting, especially when it comes to fine-tuning a movie’s emotional currents: noticing moments when a film turns overly jokey or serious and dowsing his way toward the right balance with obsessive precision. This is true off-set as well. Even when getting dressed, he will abandon an outfit if something about it feels microscopically off: the socks, maybe, or a subtly wrinkled shirt. “And then I’ll just take the whole thing off because the socks ruined it,” he said. The process is part of why he occasionally arrives late, but far worse are the mornings when no amount of fiddling seems to fix the problem. When that happens, he said, “it’s almost like it’s jinxed the day.”
In the early stages of writing, Waititi often begins by making a playlist of songs that he listens to again and again—not a soundtrack so much as an aural mood board. He also tries not to assign characters a gender, at least at first, and will sometimes swap roles, giving “female” parts or lines to a male character, and vice versa. (On Reservation Dogs, Willie Jack, played by Paulina Alexis, was originally scripted as male.) Waititi’s screenplays tend to have unusually long gestations—seven years for Boy, 11 for Wilderpeople, nine for Jojo Rabbit—and are further revised on the fly, with Waititi lobbing new lines at actors in take after take. It’s a risky strategy, he acknowledged. Every change in dialog can create follow-on effects in later scenes or subtly shift the emotional arc of a character. In an industry that’s heavily dependent on bringing shoots in on time and staying within budget, such compounding adjustments have consequences, to the point that a director might lose control—or get kicked off their own film.
That risk is outweighed, for Waititi, by the desire to experiment, both in the moment and, later, during editing. Clement, who has been Waititi’s close friend and collaborator since college, remembers him being similarly restless as a performer. When the two did live comedy shows together in their twenties, Clement recalled, Waititi would initially follow the planned beats but would soon get bored and start to improvise. “He’s good at so many things,” Clement said. “But he’s not good at sitting still. He’s really not good at that.”
The actor Chris Hemsworth told a similar story. On the set of Thor, he said, Waititi would sometimes play the theme song from the 1981 war drama Gallipoli—which culminates with Mel Gibson running through the trenches trying to stop the troops’ fatal, and futile, final charge—and then sprint back and forth across the set. The memory made Hemsworth laugh. “I don’t know why he did it,” he said. “Whether it was his way of loosening things up, or mixing it up, or just reminding us that we should be enjoying ourselves.” (“When there’s life around me, I feel more creative,” Waititi later explained, somewhat complicating his remark about finding people draining. “If it’s quiet, it feels like school. For me, the more stimulus, the better.”)
Waititi seems to actively cultivate his anarchic impulses. As a filmmaker, he is uncommonly good at capturing the inner lives of children, and his work can often seem like an ongoing exploration of what it means to grow up. In his own life, Waititi seems driven by a more complicated question: how to be childlike without being childish. On the podcast Visitations, with the actor Elijah Wood and the producer Daniel Noah, Waititi described himself as “deeply attracted to disruptive forces in my life—like chaos, or big changes.” Filmmaking, he added, fed that desire. “With film, there’s no stability. It’s a tumultuous environment where you’re always on edge, always stressed, and everything could fall over at any moment. It’s like Russian roulette with art: You put yourself in that firing line all the time.”
One of the central themes in Waititi’s movies is disillusionment, and the ways imagination can both protect and imperil. His characters frequently get lost in their own thoughts, often as a way to cope with loss. Adults barely seem to exist; when they do appear, it’s usually as a cautionary tale. The men, in particular, are unreliable: immature, mercurial, and stunted. While they tend to end up stuck in their fantasies, children, at least as Waititi writes them, ultimately emerge clear-eyed: They wake up.
Waititi’s mother, Robin Cohen, was a schoolteacher from a family of Jewish tailors who had fled the pogroms in Russia, first for London and then for Wellington. An intellectual and a communist, Cohen regularly read over Waititi’s homework, critiquing his essays and insisting that he rewrite them. His father—named Taika, but everyone called him Tiger—belonged to a small iwi (tribe) in Waihau Bay, a remote area on the island’s rocky East Coast. In his twenties, he left and founded a motorcycle gang, Satan’s Slaves, and spent time in and out of prison. He also farmed, wrote poetry, and painted: primarily landscapes and portraits but also idealized images of Native Americans. The two met when Cohen was on a charity visit to the prison, bringing books for the inmates, and Waititi has described the relationship as “the most improbable match you could imagine.” Even now, he said, “I can’t envision what their conversations would have been like.”
The couple separated when Waititi was 5, and his mother stayed in Wellington while his father moved back to Waihau Bay, a two-day drive away. For years, Waititi went back and forth between the two places, developing a knack for moving between different groups. For a time, both families were poor. In Waihau Bay, adults collected shellfish for food, drank at the town bar, and sometimes got into fights. “I learned at a very early age that you can’t trust adults,” Waititi said. “Like, you can’t really rely on any of them.”
As a kid, Waititi spent hours watching American television shows and movies, including ’80s classics like The Young and the Restless and Love at First Bite, and he still finds TV comforting: “It’s always there for you.” He also spent long days roaming the countryside, walking for hours along Waihau’s rocky coast and rugged fields, explorations that were blissfully unsupervised. Given that Waititi’s childhood was often fraught, with money tight and his father not around, he recalled the time with a surprising amount of nostalgia. “We’d just rove around in these little gangs of kids, having full control of our world,” he told me wistfully.
More often, he simply enjoyed retreating into his own imagination: sketching, making radio plays using a cassette recorder, or inventing adventure tales in which he would play all the parts. At one point, he went through a phase of compulsively drawing swastikas in his school notebooks, which he just as compulsively hid: turning the swastika into a window, then making the window part of a building, which eventually became part of a city. (Waititi mines this, lightly, in Jojo Rabbit, when 10-year-old Jojo admits that he’s “massively into swastikas.”) In his early teens, Waititi acted in a few plays put on by his mother’s friends, mostly avant-garde shows that mixed spoken word with contemporary dance, but he didn’t find the experience particularly inspiring. “There was a lot of prancing around,” he remarked.
Waititi eventually channeled these experiences into one of his most iconic films, Boy, which tells the story of an 11-year-old (Boy) and his younger brother, Rocky, who live with various cousins under the loose care of their grandmother while their father is in jail. Although the film isn’t strictly autobiographical, it was shot in Waihau Bay, in the same house where Waititi lived, and many of the details, like the rusted Toyota that can be started with a teaspoon, come from Waititi’s life. In the movie, Boy fantasizes about his absent father, whom he imagines as a deep-sea diver, master carver, and rugby star, but who is ultimately revealed to be self-deluding and petulant. Growing up, Waititi and his cousins would lie on the bed and make up similar stories. “We all knew that we were lying,” Waititi said in an interview with Mariayah Kaderbhai, the head of programming for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. “It was almost like we were trying to top each other with these excuses of why our parents weren’t around.”
Waititi has said that his films are not “an exorcism of [his] own trauma,” but when I spoke with Kaderbhai, she pointed out that Waititi’s work could be seen as a way to control his own narrative: to transform tragedy or dysfunction into something empowering and redemptive. “As children, we can’t control our world,” Kaderbhai observed. “When we tell that story as an adult, we can.”
The unstated question behind Boy is whether the young kids we meet—dreamy, artistic Rocky; intelligent, determined Boy—will end up trapped, stuck in lives like those of their parents. Many of Waititi’s cousins in Waihau Bay wound up repeating those patterns, and Waititi has described his own, very different life as “kind of a miracle.” In the film, Boy eventually learns to see his father and his self-deceptions clearly. It’s the story’s cathartic moment and one that seems to set Boy on a different path: He won’t become his father. But it’s equally clear that he’s also still a kid, surrounded by forces—poverty, lack of opportunity, a kind of stagnant resignation—that work against his abundant promise.
For years, Waititi’s own future was similarly uncertain. After graduating from the University of Wellington, he did comedy shows and toured. He also busked on the street and was the lead guitarist in a band. He spent almost 10 years as an artist, painting and making etchings, and for a while lived in a commune in Berlin. Some of the work from this period had a comic edge; one early piece, of a landscape and buildings seen from above, is titled What Clouds See When They Daydream. Other projects, like a series of altered New Zealand dollars featuring figures from history in place of Queen Elizabeth, reflected a growing awareness of colonialism. More often, Waititi simply seemed to be experimenting. At one point, he admitted, he painted nudes using his own blood—though when I asked for details, he seemed to regret having mentioned it. “Even as I was doing it, I was like, ‘I don’t see the point,’” he said. “I was really just getting a taste of everything and seeing which thing I wanted to do.”
Waititi moved back to Wellington in the late ’90s, drawn by the anarchic performance scene. “There was a lot of creativity flowing through the city,” recalled Carthew Neal, who runs the production company Piki Films with Waititi. “There were people making shows in black-box theaters and old car parks. It was like a giant creative hive, just all sorts of people doing different things.” Wellington was small and hilly, with a cluster of theater and music spaces where everyone hung out. For a while, Waititi spent time in an artists’ collective located in a warehouse opposite the national museum that hosted an endlessly cycling cast of visitors, including musicians and actors. The warehouse had no interior walls, remembered Jo Randerson, a writer and director who was also a tenant, so residents just “took over a zone” while working on a project. “It was a buzzy crew to be part of,” Randerson said. “It felt like such a concentrated batch of talent.”
For several years, Waititi performed in a comedy duo, Humourbeasts, with Jemaine Clement (who would go on to cocreate the radio and TV series Flight of the Conchords), often playing to sold-out houses. He also took small film and TV roles, most famously as a student turned drug lord in the black comedy Scarfies, and as one of five male dancers at a woman-run club on the TV series The Strip. Socially, Waititi was popular, but he could also be aloof. At dinner parties organized with his housemates, Randerson recalled, Waititi would sometimes stay downstairs by himself and draw. “He never seemed interested in doing the hustle, or playing the games, or being socially acceptable,” she added. “He had a capacity to just follow his wont.”
Waititi made his first significant film, the 10-minute short Two Cars, One Night, in 2003, after writing the script during downtime on the set of The Strip. (In interviews, Waititi has said that he decided to take the leap one day after “sitting in the green room in my G-string, staring at the ingrown hairs on my legs, and thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’”) The movie, a subtly tender snapshot of a young boy and girl idly waiting in adjacent cars while their parents drink in the pub, won a slew of film festival awards and was nominated for an Oscar. “In New Zealand, if you do anything well, you basically get encouraged by the prime minister to keep going,” Waititi has joked. “So it was like an arranged marriage. I was forced to fall in love with film. And eventually I did.”
It wasn’t an obvious pairing. New Zealand films at the time were known for being tense and dark: the so-called cinema of unease. (Or as Waititi put it: “Someone always dies. Usually a child.”) At first, Waititi tried to work in a similar vein. In 2004 he was hired to adapt a much-loved book by a New Zealand bushman, which would later become Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Neal, who produced Wilderpeople, recalled that the original script was unrelentingly bleak. “I think it was called ‘Land of Tears,’” he said dryly. “In case that gives you a sense of the tone.” Waititi eventually put the script aside in order to make his first feature film, the awkward relationship comedy Eagle vs Shark, followed by Boy, and gradually began to hone his style, with its distinctive mix of absurdity and compassion.
Waititi workshopped both Boy and Eagle vs Shark at Sundance in 2005, where he became part of a tight-knit group of Indigenous filmmakers, including Sterlin Harjo, with whom he would go on to make Reservation Dogs. When I spoke with Harjo, he said that he and Waititi had developed the idea for Reservation Dogs partly with the aim of subverting how Indigenous characters are typically presented in film and TV. Among other things, the cast includes Dallas Goldtooth as a laconic and absurdly inappropriate spirit guide who dispenses rambling advice, and a pair of rapping brothers, played by Lil Mike and Funny Bone, who cruise the neighborhood on matching kid-size bikes spreading gossip. “One of the things that Taika and I first bonded over is that our stories from home weren’t sad stories,” Harjo told me. “They were hilarious. The people in them were funny. And that was totally missing from Native film and storytelling.”
These days, Waititi has an extraordinary ability to get projects greenlit—he has a standing deal with FX—and will often go out of his way to hire Indigenous actors and crew. It helps that Hollywood studios have a penchant for elevating certain indie talents and seem to have embraced Waititi’s quirks; it also helps that his work has found new levels of respect. In 2020, Jojo Rabbit was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, while Waititi was nominated for two Emmys, for his voice-acting on The Mandalorian and as a producer on the TV adaptation of What We Do in the Shadows. Despite these accolades, Waititi has occasionally been frustrated by the way comedy can be treated as something frivolous—as “a kind of subform of art.” In his films, he noted, the comedy is there in part to disarm the audience: “When you laugh, you want more, you listen more, you’re more receptive. That’s when you can deliver a message that’s more profound.”
For contractual reasons, Waititi couldn’t tell me much about Thor: Love and Thunder, which comes out on July 8, aside from the fact that he tried to write it as a love story, and that his visual touchstones for the film were Jack Kirby comics and the cover art of old Mills & Boon romance novels. But he did say that he tried to make the film “unexpected,” at least within the confines of the genre. It’s the same approach he used in Thor: Ragnarok, where he deftly subverted the classic superhero beats by transforming Thor from a stiff, standard-issue warrior-god into a funny, awkward, surprisingly sweet, occasionally sulky man-child: in effect, an overgrown kid. “It’s really about trying to make it interesting to myself,” he said. “And not do what everyone thinks I should do. Or what they’re expecting me to do.”
So far, Waititi has managed to hold on to his offbeat sensibility, even as his projects have become bigger and more mainstream—forces that tend to encourage caution and homogeneity. (Waititi has semi-joked that he will agree with everything an executive says and then simply do what he wants. As he put it, “It’s literally me trying to not do whatever the grown-ups say.”) But he also admitted that he was struggling to recapture the exhilaration of his early career and the joyful thrill of doing something purely because he wanted to. “I do miss the feeling where I was excited to wake up and write,” he said. “So much of what I do now is associated with deadlines and with people wanting something from me. And then it starts to feel like you’re just sitting in traffic waiting to go to work.” It’s a familiar dilemma, but one that’s particularly thorny for Waititi, whose work is rooted in the ability to channel a childlike silliness and a rare feeling of innocence and vulnerability. People love Waititi’s films, noted Jo Randerson, because they have “that special ‘Taika thing,’ with its strange rhythm and weird gags and all of that. But how do you keep that alive, with this whole huge infrastructure around you?”
Part of the answer, at least for Waititi, is to lose some of the infrastructure. One of his current projects, an adaptation of the documentary Next Goal Wins, tells the story of a Dutch coach determined to get American Samoa’s national soccer team to the World Cup. The film is small—at least compared to Thor—and stars a number of Pacific Islanders. “The plot is basically ‘white guy comes to the islands to save them and gets saved himself,’” Waititi said. “But it happens through some really interesting characters, the most significant being this fa’afafina, this trans player, who changed the team.” Waititi said that he was drawn to the film partly because it was a great true story, but also because it was a sports story, which he had never done before. “My biggest fear is running out of ideas,” he added. “Or making something I’ve done before—repeating myself.”
On the rare occasions when Waititi takes time off, he likes to cook, do the crossword, and watch TV. Years ago he played online chess, but had to stop when he became too obsessed. (“I would sneak out of bed at 2 am. My girlfriend at the time would be like, ‘What are you doing?’”) He also talked longingly about an alternate life, in which he painted and tinkered. “The idea of doing something with my hands—that’s kind of my Zen place,” he said. “I can make hours and hours disappear doing that.” For the most part, though, Waititi just works relentlessly. When I said that simply listing all his projects made me feel vicariously panicky—he’s currently writing, editing, or directing three feature films and five TV series, including a Time Bandits TV series with Clement and an animated spin-off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—he shrugged. “I’ve never been happy just with one project,” he said. “Some people will focus really hard on a single film, for two or three years. I feel like I’ve got more energy than that—and more ideas than that.”
From the outside, at least, it was hard not to wonder whether this sprawling buffet of projects might backfire, feeding Waititi’s desire for variety at the expense of quality. But rather than feeling paralyzed by that prospect, he seemed energized, like a juggler equally exhilarated by the challenge of keeping everything in the air and the possibility that it could all come crashing down.
Not long after visiting Waititi in Los Angeles, I rewatched Jojo Rabbit, arguably his most ambitious and beautiful film. Waititi adapted the story from a book by Christine Leunens but changed it significantly—among other things, there was no imaginary Hitler in the original. The book was also much darker, in part because it followed the lives of Jojo, Elsa, and the other children beyond the end of the war, into its grim and protracted aftermath. Waititi, instead, chose to stop the camera on a moment of hope. Jojo has woken up to the bullying insecurity of his provisional father figure, Hitler, and by extension to the self-serving deceptions of Nazism. The war has ended. He has experienced devastating loss but is also giddy, and silly, and capable of joy. Like Boy, he’s a child just beginning to grow into his potential. He has, more than ever, full control of his world.
Updated 6-1-22, 6pm EDT: This story has been updated to correct the name of the comics that influenced Thor: Love and Thunder.
Styling by Jeanne Yang and Chloe Takayanagi. Styling assistance by Ella Harrington. Grooming by April Bautista using Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. Prop styling by Chloe Kirk. Opener: top and pants by Issey Miyake and shoes by Ermenegildo Zegna. Second image: suit by Dzojchen, shoes by Christian Louboutin. Third image: suit and shoes by Thom Browne, shirt by Hermes.
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