Taika Waititi almost always finds a part for himself in the movies he directs. He played an imaginary version of Hitler in the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit and starred as a 379-year-old vampire in What We Do in the Shadows. But Klara and the Sun, which Sony Pictures releases in US theaters today, October 23, has no Waititi anywhere in its cast list. It very nearly did.
Speaking exclusively to Radio Times at the BFI London Film Festival ahead of release, Waititi revealed he wrote and shot an entire sequence, one that does not exist in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, in which Klara, the solar-powered Artificial Friend played by Jenna Ortega, meets a band of rogue robots who have been rejected by their owners and built a society of their own. Waititi cast himself as their leader.
“I actually did write, and we shot some scenes, with a very different thing that wasn’t in the book, where Klara meets this group of rogue robots who’ve all been rejected and formed their own society,” he told Radio Times. “It was my little group of robots, and I was like, ‘This is the Taika time. This is going to be so good!'”
Ishiguro nearly wrote the same storyline first
The odd twist in Waititi’s story is that the idea almost belonged to Ishiguro before it belonged to him. Waititi said he ran the rogue-robots concept past the Nobel Prize-winning author, who told him he had been writing something very similar for the novel until his wife talked him out of it. “He said he had actually been writing a very similar thing in the book, and his wife had said, ‘Maybe don’t… not sure if that fits in the book,'” Waititi recalled. “But he had already thought of that, which was kind of cool!”
That means the robot-society storyline has now been cut twice: once from Ishiguro’s manuscript before the book reached stores in 2021, and once from Waititi’s adaptation after the scenes were already filmed.
The deleted robots could headline their own TV show
The footage may be out of the film, but Waititi says the idea is not dead. He told Radio Times the silver lining is that the rogue-robots concept will be developed as a television project: “We’re going to go and turn that into a show about these rogue robots who have formed their own society. So something good will come from that!” He named no network, streamer or timeline, so treat this as a plan Waititi talked about on a press day, not a dated commitment.
Why the cut fits the film’s release-day story
Klara and the Sun opens with rough notices. The film sits at 24% on Rotten Tomatoes as of Friday morning, and Tom’s Guide critic Josh Bell gave it two stars out of five, calling it “an annoying misfire” that is “too silly until it becomes too sappy.” The most common complaint in the first wave of reviews is tonal overload: whimsy piled on sentiment until neither lands.
In that light, leaving the robot commune on the cutting-room floor looks like the disciplined call. The subplot Waititi describes is exactly the kind of extended whimsical detour his detractors say sinks his later films, and a 116-minute adaptation of a beloved novel had no room to spare. Our read: the deleted material sounds like a better TV premise than a movie subplot anyway, because a society of rejected robots needs space to breathe that this film never had. Whether a Waititi-led robot ensemble works better in episodes than it would have in this movie is the question the spin-off will answer.
What to know before the weekend
If you are deciding whether the film is worth a ticket, our Klara and the Sun release date and where-to-watch guide has the full review picture, the cast list and the streaming outlook. If you are planning the rest of a cinema weekend, our guide to every new movie in theaters this week covers the full October 23 lineup, including Clayface and Wildwood.
For book readers, the short version is simple: nothing you loved in the novel was displaced by a robot commune, because the commune never made the final cut. For Waititi fans, the news is that his trademark on-screen oddball energy is not gone, just postponed to a TV project he sounds genuinely excited about.
Updated: October 23, 2026, 1:30 a.m. ET. This story reflects Taika Waititi’s Radio Times interview published October 22 and the film’s October 23 US theatrical release.
