He has recently finished shooting Thor: Love and Thunder (originally delayed for five months by Covid) in Australia. Two years on however, and Waititi is fizzing with energy. “I was a little burned out,” he says, “and I wanted to do something a lot easier than directing, which is acting!” Instead, his main motivation for taking the role was to take something of a break after directing his 2019 Oscar-winning Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit. Or at least not in anything more sophisticated than Mario Kart. Waititi admits he’s not hugely interested in video games himself. He plays Antoine, the douchey tech-bro villain of new movie Free Guy, about a non-playable character (played by Ryan Reynolds) who steadily begins to gain self-awareness in a huge Grand Theft Auto-style video game. His latest project is a relatively rare return to actor-for-hire. “This is pretty much my working life,” he laughs. At one point he sits down with them to play Mario Kart. Waititi is speaking to WIRED from his house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he is frantically bouncing between talking on Zoom, and placating his two at-home-from-school daughters (aged 5 and 9). Yeah, but I worked for ten years straight before Marvel gave me a call,” he says. “People are like, ‘Oh you just popped out of nowhere’. Not bad for a 45-year-old who only decided on becoming a filmmaker at 30.

It transformed Waititi’s career overnight, and has since seen him linked to everything from his own Star Wars film to a live-action version of Akira. But then came Thor: Ragnarok, the hugely successful and wildly acclaimed Marvel film which reinvented Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder as a lovable goofball. Until 2017, the writer, director and actor was best known for making small, silly but endearingly big-hearted films such as the 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, or 2016 coming-of-age comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It has been a busy few years for Taika Waititi.

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