Several years after Ben Stiller revealed that he and his wife, Christine Taylor, reconciled after their 2017 separation, the couple is opening up about what led to their estrangement.
In his new documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Stiller takes viewers behind the scenes of his parents’ relationship. As the Severance director looks back on the trials and tribulations in the marriage between the legendary comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara and how it affected him and his sister, Amy Stiller, he shares how he drew comparisons between their six decades of marriage and his relationship with Taylor.
“My career had been going along for a long time but things actually weren’t great in my personal life,” Ben admits in the documentary. “I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids and just kind of a little bit lost.”
Ben and Taylor married in 2000, after meeting in 1999, after he directed her in a never-aired Fox pilot, Heat Vision and Jack. Much like Jerry and Meara, the actors worked together a lot onscreen, including in Dodgeball, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder, Zoolander 2, Arrested Development, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
John Nacion/Variety via Getty
In the documentary, Ben recalls that when his relationship with Taylor began, he thought, “I don’t want to become my parents.”
Jerry and Meara worked closely together in their comedy duo, Stiller & Meara, which took them to stages around the country, including over 30 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Reflecting on their career and how long they spent with their personal and professional lives entwined — despite wanting different things for their futures — Ben says he often asked himself “what kind of toll that took on their actual relationship?”
“I started to think about my parents and all the stress and tension I remember seeing as a kid and the pressure when they were working together and how they stayed together through it,” he shares. “I think I wanted to somehow understand how they did it.”
It was a worry that permeated his relationship with Taylor, especially as the strain it put on his parents marriage became more obvious in Meara’s alcohol abuse and her fights with Jerry.
“I do feel like there was history and I think a lot of it was your experience of what that ultimately meant for a relationship that it could put extra strain when you’re eating, sleeping, breathing each other in that way,” Taylor tells her husband in the documentary. “I also felt like there was a fear from you for me of what that would look like to the outside world. I mean it was very loaded.”
As Taylor as previously shared during a March appearance on the Are You a Charlotte? podcast, things between the couple moved pretty quickly after they went on their first date in 1999.
The couple spent a whirlwind few weeks together before Stiller went off to shoot a new project in New York. They eventually made their first public appearance together at the June 1999 MTV Movie Awards and were married less than a year later, in May 2000. They went on to welcome two children together, daughter Ella Olivia and son Quinlin.
Then, to the surprise of many, the couple announced their separation in 2017.
In the documentary, Ben says the whole ordeal made him feel like a failure. “When we separated, my feeling was like ‘Oh, I’m failing at this’ and look at my parents, they have this incredible 50-plus-year marriage and I can’t live up to that,” he tells Taylor.
JIMI CELESTE/Patrick McMullan via Getty
When Taylor opened up about their separation during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2023, the Dodgeball star said they “got married very quickly after meeting each other” and eventually they “both started to grow in different directions.”
“It was sort of like we were both at this impasse of ‘let’s figure out what’s best: What’s best for each other at this chapter in our lives?’ … That time apart for each of us to sort of get to know who we are– I think we have these growth spurts even as adults,” she said at the time. “I feel like we needed some time to figure that out.”
Time definitely helped to heal the couple’s wounds — in February 2022, Ben revealed the couple had gotten back together while living together during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Night at the Museum star reflects on their reconciliation in the documentary, explaining, “all of a sudden we were together in the house and during that time I started to make the movie too. So there sort of this coming together.”
“Us talking about what we were going through, our issues, and looking at what my parents had been through too in a way I hadn’t looked at it before,” he adds.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost made its premiere on Oct. 5 at the New York Film Festival, and will screen in select theaters beginning on Oct. 17. The documentary will be available to stream Apple TV+ on Oct. 24.
