Mandalorian, the first live-action television se-
ries in the Star Wars universe; acting in DC’s
new Suicide Squad movie, aptly called The Sui-
cide Squad; directing a movie about the Samoan
soccer team that, against all odds, made it to
the World Cup; rebooting Flash Gordon; and
releasing his latest film, Jojo Rabbit, which he
wrote the screenplay for, directed, and stars
in. (It’s out now.)
So the only personal artifacts around this
house are a pile of books on the dining-room
table and a picture of his daughters. “The thing
with this place is, you say, ‘I don’t live in L. A.’
and yet you do live here,” he explains, in that
casual yet philosophical manner in which you
describe being happy with an arranged mar-
riage after a decade. “Both my kids were born
here—well, one of them was born in Venice
Beach and the other one was born in Hawaii.
So it all really is sort of laid out.”
He swallows some avocado and resigns
himself to the idea that he is now kinda
sorta an Angeleno.Jojo
Rabbit is the story of a ten-year-old
German boy, Jojo, who discovers a Jewish girl
hiding in the home he shares with his mother,
Rosie, during World War II. Waititi calls it an
“anti-hate satire,” and the satire is introduced
through the character of the boy’s imaginary
friend: Adolf Hitler.
Some people, including, according to Vari-
ety, a Disney executive, have found the movie
controversial. “I’m not really sure if that’s
true,” Waititi says. “I’m not sure if I should be
saying this, because I don’t want it to feel like
I’m defending myself, but [Bob Iger, CEO of
the Walt Disney Company] and [Alan F. Horn,
cochairman and chief creative officer of Walt
Disney Studios] have seen the film and have
sent me emails like, ‘This is fucking a very im-
portant film; we love the film.’ ” He considers
the situation. “This is not a film to be afraid of,by the way. It’s not challenging in the least.”
Given the recent surge of neo-Nazism, it’s
strange that a movie about a boy and his friend
Adolf is not capital-A about white national-
ism. “It was around Charlottesville when peo-
ple were asking, ‘Is this a reaction to that?’ ”
he says. “And it was like, no, this is just some-
thing I was trying to make, and weirdly, it’s be-
coming more and more pertinent.”
Also weird—and hilarious: Hitler is played
by Waititi, a Polynesian Jew.
A friend recommended a book on Hitler,
and after reading four pages, Waititi decided
he didn’t want to know anything about the guy.
“I wanted him to be a buffoon,” he says, like
Drop Dead Fred, the troublemaking imagi-
nary friend of Phoebe Cates in the eponymous
1991 cult classic.
Then there was the physical transformation.
“It was fucking horrible,” Waititi says. “It was
summer in Europe, boiling hot. I was wearing
these big fucking hats and sunblock. So I was
like the palest I’d been.” He pauses. “I was kindof losing my mind. I think when your body is
deficient of vitamins, you kind of go a bit mad.
And this is before the costume! This was just
me trying to be white. I can’t go in the sun or
I’ll fucking go brown in like five minutes. And
so then I had to get the chemical in my hair to
straighten it, because my hair”—here he just
points at his shock of salt-and-pepper curls—
“then dye it black.” He sighs. “I was just like
this fucking forty-year-old car salesman who
was trying to get on Tinder or something.” He
says in a Hitler-as-a-weenie-salesman voice:
“This is my chance to be young again!”
And in a way, it was. “He’s conjured from
the mind of a ten-year-old, so he had to be a
ten-year-old,” the director says.
Childhood is a preoccupation for Waititi, the
son of a Polynesian painter and farmer named
Tiger and a schoolteacher named Robin, who
is of Russian-Jewish heritage. Part of his child-
hood was spent in Raukokore, where he went
to a school with fewer than forty kids, and the
rest was spent in Wellington. When he was”
Waititi manages to bring big kid energy to (clockwise from top left)
vampires (What We Do in the Shadows), Norse gods (Thor: Ragnarok), and
Aryan assholes (Jojo Rabbit).89