Chelsea Winstanley, Taika Waititi’s ex-wife, gave a candid interview about the breakdown of their marriage.
Chelsea is a successful Māori film producer, writer, and director. She’s also been a driving force in getting various Disney films translated into te reo Māori.
She met Taika when she interviewed him for a documentary. The two were married in 2011, share two daughters, and are speculated to have split in 2018. The couple also worked together for some time, with Chelsea acting as a producer on Jojo Rabbit and What We Do in the Shadows.
Not much has been known about their split, though some have speculated that infidelity was involved on Taika’s part. He is currently married to Rita Ora, whom he appears to have met in 2018.
On the podcast It’s Personal With Anika Moa, Chelsea was asked about having to take a “backseat” from her “mahi” [Māori for “work”] while she had Taika’s children and he was “doing his thing.”
“To be really, brutally honest, I probably started forming a bit of resentment in that moment,” Chelsea replied. “You don’t make a human being on your own — therefore, you shouldn’t have to raise a human being on your own, either. When that little seed of resentment was starting to form — I want to be really honest and own my participation in that, in the unraveling of our relationship.”
Speaking about when Taika got his first major studio directing gig, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, she said, “I didn’t want to be the dutiful wife and race over to the Gold Coast [in Australia], where he was making Thor, and sit in an apartment all day long, fucking twiddling my thumbs, and bring the kids out.”
“Lots of other wives do that, and in other departments, I’ll dutifully do that thing. But I couldn’t think of anything fucking worse,” Chelsea continued. “That would mean I have to take my babies out of kōhanga reo [Māori-speaking kindergarten]. And that, to me, was really important. So I said, ‘I’m not going to do that, but we’ll come over and visit.'”
“That probably was the beginning of the unraveling because I wasn’t that pandering, dutiful, get on my knees and whatever you want.’ Someone else was, though,” she added, seemingly confirming the cheating speculation. “I didn’t know that until many years later.”
While acknowledging her “stubbornness,” Chelsea said that she was ultimately “glad” to have chosen that path, which included her working on her movie Waru and the documentary Merata: How Mom Decolonized the Screen: “That’s true to me. Those projects and that type of storytelling, that’s me. That’s got nothing to do with what was going on.”
“I needed to focus on my own stuff. It reaffirmed for me that I can do that. I don’t need anyone else for me to be able, happy, and [in control], or do what I want to do in the spaces that I love,” Chelsea continued.
The filmmaker recalled, “It’s nice to have someone who can support you, or just to go, ‘You got this’ or ‘I’m so proud of you.’ But there was never any of that. There was no interest in what I wanted to be doing. So that said volumes, really.”
“I think I was married to someone who really was on their own buzz and tunnel vision,” she added. “We’re all on our own journey, so to help me get through on a daily basis, I just remind myself that I’m not responsible for what anybody does. I’m only responsible for the way in which I react.”
“As time goes by, you’re actually angry at yourself for not believing that you deserved better,” she said, noting how childhood trauma influenced the situation. Chelsea explained that a discussion with a near-70-year-old woman helped her realize that she was putting up with unhealthy situations “so long as what [she] was putting [herself] through wasn’t as bad as the childhood rape.”
You can listen to the full interview here.