Young Jojo Rabbit star: ‘I was out of breath after the first two heil Hitlers’
After his screen debut with Taika Waititi, Roman Griffin Davis talks to Kevin Maher about his nomination in tomorrow’s Golden Globes – and being trolled by Nazis.
ROMAN GRIFFIN DAVIS leaps, literally, on to the screen in Jojo Rabbit, executing the most dynamic ‘‘mad dash’’ opening sequence in a movie since Ewan McGregor’s sprint in Trainspotting. Griffin Davis is running through a provincial German town. We are in the dying days of the World War II and the boy is dressed in the brown shirt and black shorts of the Hitler Youth.
The soundtrack is the Beatles’ German version of I Want to Hold Your Hand (Komm, gib mir deine Hand). The mood is euphoric and Griffin Davis whirls and leaps and runs, greeting everyone he passes with an exuberant, almost musical Nazi salute. ‘‘Heil Hitler!’’ he yells, arm raised.
‘‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!’’ Both arms now, flinging up one after another, like some bonkers disco move. The sequence is intercut with archive footage of actual Hitler Youth rallies from the 1930s. The effect is dizzying; delightful and profoundly disturbing. It was also, apparently, quite tiring.
‘‘I was out of breath after the first two heil Hitlers,’’ says Griffin Davis, 12, seemingly embarrassed, yet not really as he remembers the shoot in Prague in the summer of 2018. Jojo Rabbit is a deadpan satirical comedy and a coming-of-age drama from writerdirector Taika Waititi.
It bounces between delicate scenes featuring Griffin Davis’ conflicted 10-year-old Hitler Youth enthusiast, Johannes ‘‘Jojo’’ Betzler, and harsher potshots at the absurdities of the Nazi world that surrounds him.
Of the opening sequence, the London-born Griffin Davis says: ‘‘That wasn’t actually in the script but Taika ... was trying to show how ridiculous all the heil Hitlering was, and such. But it was fun and I felt idiotic doing it, which, I think, was the point.’’
Griffin Davis speaks like this – with breathless, free-flowing, sometimes random, often adorable 12-year-old enthusiasm.
We are in a hotel suite in central London. His French mother, Camille Griffin, a writer-director with camera department credits on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Layer Cake, is floating about, as is an obligatory publicist. There is a buzz around Griffin Davis and his extraordinary screen debut.
Weeks after our conversation he will be nominated for a Golden Globe award for best actor, making him one of the youngest nominees in history, following in the footsteps of Macaulay Culkin.
He will respond to the nomination with another breathless stream-of-consciousness reflection. Today he is in the middle of a whirlwind promotional tour and has recently arrived from the Toronto Film Festival, where
Jojo Rabbit won the people’s choice award, which often predicts the best picture winner at the Oscars.
He does not, thankfully, do that child-actor thing of emulating adults and talking about ‘‘the industry’’ and ‘‘the business’’ and his ‘‘craft’’.
He is gloriously unaffected and quite a hoot, lying sideways on the sofa. He tries, occasionally, to talk the talk, with conspicuous use of ‘‘and such’’ to indicate gravitas. ‘‘I think it was a hard challenge for Taika to play Hitler,’’ he says, when discussing the director’s decision to play a fantasy version of the Fuhrer, simply called ‘‘Adolf’’, who pops into scenes whenever young Jojo is feeling disconsolate or confused. ‘‘But I think he really did complete that challenge. And such.’’ He fills his chat, mostly, with selfdeprecating gags about his performance.
‘‘I think I was cast because Taika had a tasselled jacket when I met him and my mum has a tasselled jacket too.
‘‘Because it was definitely not my acting abilities, I can tell you that much.’’ He does a neat American accent too, one that he whips out whenever he feels himself drifting into actorly nonsense.
When he mentions that he auditioned for the film Goodbye Christopher Robin before Jojo Rabbit but failed to get the gig, he says, with Hollywood-style cheesiness: ‘‘I felt like acting had become part of me, and it was something that I needed to conquer.’’ And he drops in some gorgeous solecisms too, such as his description of Waititi’s approach to playing Hitler. ‘‘I feel like he was ridiculising Hitler and that gave him less power.’’
Discussing his family – including his cinematographer dad, Ben Davis, who was the director of photography on Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange, and his younger twin brothers, Gilby and Hardy, who play Nazi clones in the film – and how they keep him grounded, he says: ‘‘Yes, I communicate with my family, and if I was heading in that direction they would tell me.’’ Griffin Davis, however, does all his real talking on the screen. His Jojo is a powerhouse turn, requiring a wealth of subtle and expressive emotion that some seasoned actors (not naming names, Keanu Reeves) have yet to acquire.
Jojo begins the movie in bliss, heading off on a Hitler Youth camping weekend with jaded Nazi team leaders played by Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson. (‘‘We Aryans are 1000 times more civilised and advanced than any other race. Now get your things together kids, it is time to burn some books!’’)
A mishap with a grenade leads Jojo into darker places, with facial scarring, a limp and a simmering temper. His attentive mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), tells him that he is not deformed, to which he roars back: ‘‘My face looks like a goddamn street map, woman!’’
And as Jojo starts to bond with a Jewish refugee, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), his carapace of cruelty begins to crack, and he is required to play hard and yet soft underneath, but still trying to be hard, while embracing that same softness. In one moving scene Elsa tells him some difficult truths. ‘‘You are not a Nazi!’’ she says, staring into his huge, confused eyes. ‘‘Er, um, but I am massively into swastikas,’’ comes his shaky response.
‘‘So I think that is a good sign right there.’’
Griffin Davis had an acting coach on set and modestly credits her with all the hard work.
He adds that he needed all his powers of concentration to nail Jojo’s three defining characteristics – the lines, the limp, the accent. ‘‘There were so many times where I would march off normally, across a room, and Taika would be, like [he screams], ‘The limp!’ And to get the accent right I’d just go, in my mind, before I was about to do the scene [drops into wildly exaggerated German vocal sounds], ‘Vacks backs schneeezal vacks nadam nacks!’ And that helped.’’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering his father’s job, he says that he was not intimidated by being on a movie set. He is used to blockbuster productions and to spending time in Los Angeles when his father works there.
His real home is in East Sussex. ‘‘My parents moved there from London when I was 2,’’ he says. ‘‘It is dead boring.’’
Acting happened by accident, when his mother handed his photo to a casting agent, who signed him. That led to the failed audition for Goodbye Christopher Robin, which led to Jojo Rabbit.
Despite the tasselled jacket story, he really thinks he nailed the part because of a single line reading. Waititi loved his inflection on the line, not used in the finished film: ‘‘I think love smells like soap.’’
‘‘I was really lucky because I said it a bit awkwardly, and it seemed to come out right.’’
Fame, so far, has been kind to him, although his official Instagram account, established at the behest of his ‘‘team’’, was trolled by neo-Nazis, unhappy with the film’s less than respectful depiction of Hitler. pretty