Rachel House, the Waititi scene-stealer who coached his child stars

Rachel House

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 20, 1971 Auckland, New Zealand
Occupation	Actress and director
Known for	Thor: Ragnarok, Soul, Moana
Awards	Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit · Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate · WIFT NZ Mana Wāhine · Te Waipuna-ā-Rangi · Chapman Tripp Theatre

In Hunt for the Wilderpeople she barrels through the New Zealand bush shouting “No child left behind!”, a social worker who has confused a runaway foster kid with a military campaign. Paula, the part Rachel House plays for Taika Waititi, is a joke about institutional power with a loudhailer. What the audience never sees is that, between takes, House was also coaching the boy she spends the film chasing, Julian Dennison.

That double shift runs through her whole career. Audiences outside New Zealand know her face as the Grandmaster’s bodyguard in Thor: Ragnarok and her voice as Gramma Tala, the grandmother who sends the heroine of Moana out past the reef. Far fewer know that she helped direct the te reo Māori version of that same film, or that she was a prize-winning theatre director long before Hollywood had her number.

Rachel Jessica Te Ao Maarama House was born in Auckland on 20 October 1971 and raised in Kamo, on the northern edge of Whangārei, by her adoptive Scottish parents, John and Sheila House. Her whakapapa runs through Ngāti Mutunga, Te Ātiawa and Ngāi Tahu, and a great deal of her later work reads as a slow, deliberate return to it. She graduated from Toi Whakaari, the national drama school, in 1992 and went straight onto the stage with Pacific Underground Theatre and Auckland Theatre Company.

The theatre rewarded her early. Briar Grace-Smith’s one-woman show Nga Pou Wahine won her the Chapman Tripp award for most promising female newcomer in 1995. In 2000 she took Most Outstanding Performance for playing Tiriti, a woman of 160, in Witi Ihimaera’s Woman Far Walking. A year later she was named director of the year at both the Chapman Tripp and the New Zealand Listener awards for Mitch Tawhi Thomas’s Have Car, Will Travel. The order matters. She was running rehearsal rooms before most cinemagoers had seen her act.

The screen came gradually. She played Shilo in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider, then joined the loose repertory company around Waititi with his debut feature, Eagle vs Shark, and Boy, in which she was Aunty Gracey and, off camera, the coach for its young cast. That second job became a specialty. She has coached performances on Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit and Next Goal Wins, and worked beside Jane Campion on Top of the Lake and The Power of the Dog. The unforced timing of Waititi’s child leads, so often credited to his own looseness on set, owes a real debt to her.

Then the scale changed. In 2016 Disney cast her as Gramma Tala in Moana, the grandmother who dances with the manta rays, and a year later Marvel made her Topaz, the Grandmaster’s deadpan enforcer in Thor: Ragnarok, a character she voiced again in the animated What If…?. Pixar gave her Terry, the afterlife’s fussy counter of souls, in Soul. Working with Tweedie Waititi of Matewa Media, she co-directed the Māori-language version of Moana, putting a Polynesian story back into a Polynesian language, and it may outlast all of those studio credits.

There is a price for being this good at one register. Run down her credits and the same figure keeps returning: Paula the welfare officer, Principal Woodsy across three seasons of Netflix’s Heartbreak High, Topaz the bodyguard, Mony the crime boss of Stan’s Sunny Nights. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Bridget McManus wrote that “with her commanding presence and unmistakable New Zealand accent, Rachel House is a serial scene-stealer on Australian television and film”, which is the problem stated as praise. The industry has found a superb use for her, the voice of authority played for laughs, and has rarely asked for the woman who in 2012 staged Toroihi rāua ko Kahira, a te reo Māori Troilus and Cressida, at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, a production that won her production and director of the year at home.

She has started answering that herself. After directing studies at the Prague Film School in 2008 and the short The Winter Boy in 2010, she wrote and directed her first feature, The Mountain, with Waititi as executive producer. Three children, one of them an eleven-year-old with cancer, set out to climb Taranaki Maunga. The film had its world premiere in New Plymouth in March 2024, beneath the mountain it is named for, before screening at the Toronto International Film Festival; Ngāti Mutunga and Te Ātiawa are both Taranaki iwi, which gives the setting a weight no location scout could supply. “I set out to write a film for our country,” she said. Critics in Australia and New Zealand largely agreed it was a rare kind of children’s film, one that lets grief sit beside the jokes, and Hope Runs High took it into American cinemas in April 2026.

Her acting calendar has not thinned. She returned as Gramma Tala in Moana 2, voiced Malgosha, the piglin ruler of the Nether, in A Minecraft Movie, joined the voice cast of Zootopia 2 and played the pirate Mary Read in the second season of Our Flag Means Death. In Sunny Nights, which arrived on Stan on Boxing Day 2025, she is the gang boss squeezing the hapless siblings played by Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden. The honours have kept pace: an Arts Foundation Laureate award in 2012, the WIFT New Zealand Mana Wāhine award in 2016, and appointment as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2017 for services to the performing arts.

This week brings a reunion with Waititi in the most sombre register he has tried. In his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Klara and the Sun, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 15 October and opens in American and British cinemas on 23 October, House plays Melania, the housekeeper who watches Jenna Ortega‘s artificial friend with open suspicion, in a household run by Amy Adams. Early reviews have been hard on the film, and Screen Daily called it overstuffed. The part itself is telling: a guardian at the door, wary of the newcomer, the person in charge once again.

No second feature has been announced. The Mountain showed that she can carry a film from the first page of the script to a premiere under its own maunga, and the decision that will shape the next decade of her career is how soon she goes back behind the camera.