Why Jacinda Ardern made a deeply intimate documentary about her marriage

Friday, 25 July 2025

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 repeatedly asking partner 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 D.C.’s Conrad hotel before speaking to a rapt crowd about her recent memoir at the historic synagogue Sixth & I.

In person, Ardern, 44, is warm and disarmingly down-to-earth. She styled her hair herself, now a few shades lighter than it was in the film. Her aide says she’s travelling with “a far bigger entourage” than usual: three people, including him. In the car, she offers everyone dark chocolate from New Zealand, then insists they’re not taking big enough chunks. But there are also hints that she’s still living with some trauma from her time as prime minister. She pre-signed all her books and only takes questions at the event that were submitted in advance. She’s ushered in and out of the room in record time by several large security guards.

Stepping off the train in Washington, she says, the first thing that hit her was the city’s sheer amount of history. “Obviously this is an incredibly difficult time, and a period where it feels like the US is retreating from being out in the world,” Ardern says. “But that is not forever. This is a place that reminds you that history is much longer than this moment in time.”

When Gayford started asking her to process her raw emotions about her biggest moments as prime minister on camera, Ardern went along with it because she figured no one would ever see it. That is, until the couple handed over 300 hours of tape to documentarians Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz following Ardern’s shocking January 2023 resignation as New Zealand’s prime minister. Her voice trembling, she’d said she was stepping down because, “I no longer have enough in the tank” to give the job what it required.

“You might ask why on earth would we do this and put this much of ourselves out on screen,” says Gayford, 48. “And the goal that we wanted to achieve is just trying to humanise politicians. [They’re] just people, by and large, trying to make the best decisions that they can.”

A widely known radio DJ and host of a TV show he created called Fish of the Day, Gayford says he was simply operating on instinct when he first pulled out a camera to document Ardern learning she’d become prime minister in 2017 at age 37, having found out days earlier that she was pregnant. Then he kept finding himself in the craziest of situations. (The film also features audio diaries that Ardern recorded for New Zealand’s national library.)

In what would be a major scandal in the United States, but barely made a ripple in New Zealand, Ardern and Gayford weren’t married when she was sworn in. At a news conference announcing her pregnancy, Gayford joked that he loved that they’d done everything backward: “We bought a house together, then we’re having a baby, and we’ll see [about marriage].” (They got engaged during her first term, with her bodyguard standing by, but didn’t manage to pull off a wedding until after she left office.)

There’s a moment early in the film when Gayford apologises for prodding Ardern to reflect on her election win while she’s sitting on an unmade bed, trying to get gunk out of her eye.

“You’re not going to force me to process this, this morning,” she says, smiling, but curt. “I don’t have time.”

“Well, I’m conflicted because, as your partner, I want to support you, but as someone who’s trying to film this, it would be nice to know what’s going through your head, I guess,” Gayford says, with a nervous chuckle.

“I’m not doing this right now,” Ardern says, giving him a death stare before immediately leaving the room.

Gayford was there at the United Nations General Assembly when Ardern was trying to figure out where to breastfeed in a building set up for male leadership, and by her side during violent pandemic-era anti-vaccination mandate protests calling her “Jabcinda” and waving signs depicting her as Hitler.

“Sometimes I felt like the worst partner in the world,” Gayford says over Zoom. He’s speaking from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is being an objectively pretty great partner and taking care of their daughter Neve, who turned 7 last month, while Ardern is on her book tour.

It would usually take Gayford until 11 at night to work up the courage to ask his partner to relitigate on-camera whatever global event she was dealing with – “She couldn’t go anywhere, she was trapped,” he says, laughing – which is why so much of the film features Ardern in her pajamas.

Ardern says she ultimately wanted to do the movie as a tribute to Gayford, who put his career on pause to take care of Neve while Ardern ran the country. “Clarke’s amazing. He’s a kind of quiet hero behind the scenes,” Ardern says. And she wanted to show women how much help she needed to do everything she’s done. “They shouldn’t be taking everything on,” she says.

It is Gayford’s home videos, of course, that make Prime Minister so incredibly intimate – a rare glimpse of a world leader at her most vulnerable, often tearing up as she tackles the weight of perhaps the most difficult premiership in New Zealand history – while a baby crawls around on her desk.

“Be nice to see you sometime,” he says, almost pleading, off-camera.

“Yup,” she says, not even looking up from her paperwork.

We see Ardern chiding Gayford about eating her pregnancy biscuits (“Are you worried about your milk production? Hormone stores?”); Gayford telling her she looks like “a real ratty porcupine” as she lies in bed getting acupuncture for her swollen feet; and Ardern’s mother’s honest reaction when told the baby’s name. “Neve? That’s different.”

Ardern and Gayford met in 2012, back when she was a junior member of Parliament and he was the famous one. A year later, he emailed her.

“I had a grievance, and I reached out to my local friendly list MP, who happened to be her, and offered to see if there was some way I could help with her campaign. We were friends for a long time first,” Gayford says.

Ardern had been raised Mormon and had mostly dated others in the faith. As an MP, she couldn’t go on dating apps, and two boyfriends had already split up with her over her career, one via text. “But then came Clarke,” she writes in her book.

When they got together, of course, neither of them knew she’d become prime minister. But Gayford (as well as Walshe) says he had no doubt she was going places. “Oh, I think everyone around Jacinda believed in her abilities, perhaps more than she did,” he says.

The realities of dating a PM were more unpredictable. As soon as she took office, Ardern lost access to her cellphone. Gayford suddenly had to figure out how to talk to her when every 15-minute block of her calendar was reserved for national business.

The film shows a couple who has figured out a division of labour under extraordinary circumstances, but Gayford says they never discussed who would step back from work. “It was a case of just rolling your sleeves up and getting it done. And I never thought that that was anything other than what you do when you’re in a relationship, right? You divide and conquer to get through whatever it is through the day,” he says.

Prime Minister will screen in Napier, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Christchurch, Dunedin, Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, Masterton and Nelson as part of the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival. Seee nziff.co.nz for dates and sessions times.