Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun Puts His Comic Reflex on Trial

Taika Waititi

Photo: CaseyJNewell / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 16, 1975 Wellington, New Zealand
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit, What We Do in the Shadows
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Grammy · Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit · Billy T

Taika Waititi was in the middle of the worst reviews of his career when an interviewer asked about the Star Wars film Lucasfilm had announced with his name on it, and he gave the kind of answer publicists dread. “I hate to break this to you, but we’re going to actually put it on ice,” he told Inverse, adding that he and the screenwriter Tony McNamara were now working on something else. Then he reached for a gag: “Ice ages do come to an end.” That reflex, the punchline arriving exactly where the room expects solemnity, built his career and won him an Academy Award. With Klara and the Sun, his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a companion android, critics have started to describe it as a tic.

The name on his birth certificate is Taika David Cohen. A Wellington native, he is the son of a Māori artist of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent and Robin Cohen, a schoolteacher whose family tree includes Russian Jews from Novozybkov. He has called himself a “Polynesian Jew”. His parents split when he was a small child, and he grew up mostly with his mother, moving between Wellington’s Aro Valley and Raukokore, on the Bay of Plenty coast, while his father drifted in and out of prison. For years he signed his film and writing work as Cohen and kept Waititi, his father’s name, for painting. After his first short film, Waititi stuck.

By 1997, when he finished a theatre degree at Victoria University of Wellington, the boy born on 16 August 1975 had already found the stage work that would matter more than the diploma. With Jemaine Clement he formed the comedy duo The Humourbeasts, which took New Zealand’s Billy T Award in 1999, and he began making shorts. The short that changed his trajectory was quieter. Two Cars, One Night, about two boys and a girl killing time in the car park of a rural pub in Te Kaha, earned an Oscar nomination for best live-action short.

His features grew out of that car park. Eagle vs Shark, co-written with his then partner Loren Horsley, came first in 2007. Boy followed, premiering at Sundance in 2010, with Waititi himself playing the ex-con father who returns to a son who has mythologised him. Hunt for the Wilderpeople, built from a Barry Crump novel around Sam Neill and the teenage Julian Dennison on the run in the bush, later matched it: each became the top-grossing film ever funded and produced entirely in New Zealand. In between, he and Clement made What We Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary about vampire flatmates in suburban Wellington that later became a long-running FX series. Underneath all of them sat the same material: a boy waiting for a father who would not come, with the jokes doing the work of a bandage.

Hollywood hired him to apply that bandage at scale. Thor: Ragnarok in 2017 turned one of Marvel‘s stiffest strands into a buddy comedy, with Waititi providing the motion-capture performance for Korg, the soft-spoken rock creature who stole scenes from gods. Two years later came the gamble that defines him. Jojo Rabbit, adapted from Christine Leunens’s novel Caging Skies, follows a boy in the Hitler Youth whose mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home, and Waititi cast himself as the boy’s imaginary Hitler, a preening buffoon. It won him the Oscar for best adapted screenplay, making him the first person of Māori descent to win in a screenplay category, along with the BAFTA in the same category and, as a producer of the soundtrack, a Grammy.

Television widened the footprint. He directed the first-season finale of The Mandalorian and voiced the droid IG-11, earning an Emmy nomination. With Sterlin Harjo he co-created Reservation Dogs, about Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma, staffed in front of and behind the camera by Indigenous talent. In Our Flag Means Death he played Blackbeard as a weary romantic.

The trouble began when the method became a brand. Thor: Love and Thunder, released in 2022, drew mixed notices, with Mark Kermode complaining that the jokes and catchphrases felt “incredibly tired”. Next Goal Wins, the American Samoa football comedy he had shot years earlier and partly reshot after Armie Hammer was replaced by Will Arnett, premiered at Toronto in 2023 to a beating; Peter Bradshaw called it “strikingly unfunny”. In Jojo Rabbit the gag was a provocation, a way of shrinking a monster. Applied to every scene of every film, it starts to look like a refusal to stay in the room with sadness. That is precisely the charge against Klara and the Sun. Bradshaw gave it one star and called it a “sentimental mess”, and David Jenkins of Little White Lies pointed to a “juvenile habit of undercutting any hint at profundity with a jolt of silly humour or a comic rug pull”. Screen Daily was kinder, praising the performances and visuals. But Ishiguro’s novel works by withholding, and Waititi’s instinct is to release pressure.

The film itself is his largest serious bet. Written with Dahvi Waller, it casts Jenna Ortega as Klara, with Amy Adams as the mother of the sick girl Josie, played by Mia Tharia, alongside Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne. It was shot in 2024 at Silverlight Studios in Wānaka and in Auckland under the working title Tears and Rain, and Michael Giacchino wrote the score, his fourth film with Waititi. After a world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 15 October 2026, Sony is releasing it through Columbia in the United States and the United Kingdom on 23 October. In September he was on screen rather than behind it, playing Nelson, a divorced man, opposite Ellen Burstyn in Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be, which premiered out of competition at Venice. Earlier in the year he directed a Pepsi Super Bowl commercial.

Off screen, Waititi married the producer Chelsea Winstanley in 2011; they have two daughters and separated in 2018. He married the singer Rita Ora in August 2022. He has also used his leverage at home, executive producing films by Māori and Indigenous directors such as Night Raiders and We Were Dangerous, while his cousin Tweedie Waititi and Winstanley produce Māori-language versions of Disney animated films.

What comes next is crowded. By his own count he has “about four other movies” in motion, including the project with McNamara, and Netflix has cast him as the voice of Willy Wonka in its animated Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory, which he also executive produces. The Star Wars film sits in the freezer. The more revealing test is smaller: whether the director who made a nation laugh at Hitler can now hold a silence for a full scene without cutting to the joke.