The scenes in Jacinda Ardern’s new documentary, Prime Minister, feel like a home movie—and for good reason. Most of the footage of her tenure as New Zealand’s 40th prime minister was shot by her now husband, Clarke Gayford.
In Prime Minister, out in theaters on June 13, we meet Ardern in the moments between press conferences—like the one where she announced to the world that she was pregnant.
“It’s very jarring turning your pregnancy into a press statement,” Ardern, then 37, says as she lays in bed while sifting through paper, Gayford filming her. Or when, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in her nation, she was going to lockdown the country: “I’m going to work on saying the words, ‘I’m shutting down New Zealand’ without crying.”
Ardern took office in 2017. Two years later an Australian white supremacist killed 51 Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch. Prime Minister captures Ardern laying flowers, hugging mourners, and fighting for a law banning most semiautomatic weapons. It passed weeks after the terrorist attack. It shows Ardern responding to the fatal volcanic eruption in December of that same year. And it shows the MAGA-flag-waving protesters who threatened her after her vigorous response to COVID.
Toward the end of the film, Ardern is deciding what to wear when she resigned in 2023. Gayford asks her why she’s leaving office. “It’s almost the politics that I find pretty unrelenting,” she tells him.
The documentary—and her new memoir, A Different Kind of Power, out earlier this month—is full of these intimate moments. Ardern tells me that letting people see her vulnerability is worth it if it humanizes leadership. “And I don’t just mean in politics,” she says, “I mean generally. It’s been very easy to dehumanize one another, and when we dehumanize one another, it’s so much easier for people to switch to anger, violence, and aggression. And we forget that we’re humans—most of the time doing our best.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Ardern details her whirlwind election as prime minister, governing a nation through tragic circumstances, moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, what we ought to expect from our leaders, and how she isn’t planning to run for anything else. “Unless,” she clarifies, “we consider this just a general campaign for humanity.”
Vanity Fair: In the film, after you were first elected, you said that you felt like you were floating above yourself. I’m curious if you feel more grounded now?
Jacinda Ardern: I think probably what I was trying to describe was how surreal that particular moment was—because of its speed. To give a little sequence of events: I had, that morning, arrived at the airport for a version of a red-eye flight, very early in the morning, to go down to Wellington. There’d been a question mark over whether my leader was staying or going. There’d been a bit of speculation, and as I arrived in Wellington, there was a report on the radio of my leader doing an interview, saying, “I’m not going anywhere.”And within an hour, he quit and he nominated me. I think it would have been maybe 90 minutes later that I was in a press conference. I was standing there, giving my first address as the new leader of the Labour Party, knowing that in 56 days I was going to be on the ballot to be prime minister. It was a very surreal situation. Immediately after, I was crashing back down to earth, planning an election, getting the photos done, the billboards, you know, straight back into the reality of the situation.
