Why Jacinda Ardern made an intimate documentary about her marriage
The former NZ prime minister went along with her husband when he started filming her because she figured no one would ever see it. Two filmmakers had other ideas.
From left, Lindsay Utz, Jacinda Ardern and Michelle Walshe at the premiere of “The Prime Minister” at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January. Getty
Somewhere on the cutting-room floor of Prime Minister, a new documentary about Dame Jacinda Ardern’s fraught 5½ years leading New Zealand through crisis after crisis, is a montage of her repeatedlyasking her husband Clarke Gayford to please get that camera out of her face.
“Someone would have just seen a lot of me telling him to go away,” Ardern says, laughing, over a squeezed-in lunch of tomato soup at the Conrad Hotel in Washington before speaking to a rapt crowd about her recent memoir at the historic synagogue Sixth & I.
