A Boy And His Fuhrer

How do you Follow up Thor: Ragnarok? For Director Taika Waititi, The Answer was to make a comedy about Nazi Germany, And cast himself as Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Jojo Rabbit Turned out be his most difficult movie yet.

- Dan Jolin

IT WASN'T THE MOUSTACHE THAT BOTHERED HIM MOST Nor the straightened, dyed hair, pasted down over his forehead. Nor the jackboots or the brown shirt. Nor even the sweat-inducing fat suit clinging beneath it all. When Taika Waititi first looked at himself in the mirror as Adolf Hitler, the thing that really made him uncomfortable was the swastika band wrapped around his left arm. “It’s so bright and in your face,” he grimaces. “It’s just a horrible thing to look at.”

Today, late September in Hollywood, Waititi’s hair is back to its springy, grey-flecked self, and he’s stretched out on a couch wriggling his toes in a pair of odd houndstooth socks. Unlike, say, Charlie Chaplin, who lampooned der Führer in 1940’s The Great Dictator, Waititi couldn’t look any less like Hitler if he tried. But when he first saw himself as the Nazi commander-in-chief, who appears as a ten-year-old German boy’s imaginary friend in Waititi’s latest film Jojo Rabbit, he wasn’t so much shocked by the transformation as mortified.

“I was just sort of embarrassed. That’s the main thing. I was embarrassed all the time to look like that. Going on set, I’d say, ‘Look, sorry everyone.’ It felt like it was hard for it not to be gratuitous. You start asking yourself why you’re really doing it: ‘Why am I dressed like this?’”

It’s a good question. After directing the raucous ard ridiculously successful Thor: Ragnarok for Marvel Studios, Taika Waititi arguably could have made any movie he wanted. “The next logical choice was Batman, wasn’t it?” he says. Instead, he chose to make a whimsical satire set in Nazi Germany, starring himself as the founder of the Third Reich.

It’s fair to ask: what the hell was he thinking?