Taika Waititi Says It’s Been “Really Cool” to Have His Kids on “Every Set of Every Film” He’s Worked On

Waititi and Winstanley welcomed their eldest daughter, Te Hinekahu, on May 20, 2012, in Los Angeles. “I’m really loving it,” Waititi told the New Zealand Herald about being a first-time father. “Her full name is Te Kainga o Te Hinekaahu Waititi. That’s a derivative of my great-grandmother’s name.” Since he’s been around babies all of his life due to having a “big, extended family,” Waititi said taking on the role of a parent has been “quite easy” for him. “It just feels very natural,” he said at the time.

Waititi also opened up about fatherhood while talking to Kieran Culkin for Interview magazine in May 2023. The director admitted that he feels guilty being away from his daughters when traveling for work. “I’ll be away for a month or two at a time and try to really make up for that when we get back together,” he said. “It’s tough being a parent who abandons your kids.” Because of this, he encourages his daughters to visit him at work. “My kids have been on every set of every film, and they meet all different types of personalities in this little contained society. It’s really cool,” he said.

Three years after starting their family, Waititi and Winstanley welcomed their second daughter, Matewa Kiritapu, on Aug. 11, 2015, in New Zealand.

In 2022, Te Hinekahu and Matewa Kiritapu accompanied their dad to the Sydney and London premieres of “Thor: Love and Thunder,” in which they both guest starred. Waititi’s kids had small roles as Asgardian children. “I always encourage people to have their kids around because it’s just a cool environment and it chills the crew out,” Waititi told People about making “Thor: Love and Thunder” a family affair.

Waititi also revealed that some of the monsters in the film were based on drawings that all of their kids made. “I was typing the script and my daughter kind of leaned over and she was like, ‘What’s an oil monster?’ That’s like the first thing I could come up with [when] I was writing. I said, ‘I have no idea. I just wrote oil monster, whatever that means.’ And she goes, ‘What do you think that looks like? Do you think it’s spiky?’ And then she draws this like snakey thing,” Waititi recalled.

“And then Taika said to me, ‘Tell your kids to do some drawings,’ and they did some drawings,” Hemsworth added. After they were finished, Waititi took the drawings and gave them to the artists working on the film so they could bring them to life. “They turned them into these fully rendered, wild monsters,” Waititi said. “In some of the kids’ [drawings], they were super colorful. So we toned those down. But yeah, that’s why the monsters are so weird and look so cool. That’s why the monsters look like they were created by kids.”