Ben Stiller wasn’t ready to give up on his decades-long marriage to Christine Taylor, even if he didn’t think they would get back together.
The “Zoolander” star told The Hollywood Reporter this week that after he and his wife of 25 years split up in 2017, he still loved her and wanted to make it work.
“I didn’t expect we were going to get back together,” he admitted, “but when we broke up, there was a part of me that wasn’t ready to just give up on it.”
The 59-year-old added, “Probably a certain amount of that is having watched my parents.”
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Stiller’s parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, were a famous married comedy duo who were often featured on Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson’s shows.
The “There’s Something About Mary” star also frequently cast them in his movies — along with Taylor, who played his love interest in “Zoolander.”
Of his parents’ work and personal life dynamic, Stiller told The Hollywood Reporter: “My dad was committed to turning their relationship into something that they could make a living doing a comedy act about, and my mom didn’t really love that as much, but she was really good at it, and that affected their relationship.”
Along with “Zoolander,” which came out the year after Stiller and Taylor, 53, married in 2000, Taylor starred with him in 2004’s “Dodgeball,” 2008’s “Tropic Thunder” and she had a small part in 2016’s “Zoolander 2.”
Stiller told The Hollywood Reporter that he began to mirror his parents’ work dynamic with his own marriage.
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“You start making movies, and if they don’t go well, that would affect me,” he said.
Three years after they separated in 2017, Stiller and Taylor decided to live together with their two children during the COVID-19 pandemic and within months they made the decision to get back together.
The couple share Ella, 22, and Quinlin, 19, together.
Stiller credited a “certain amount” of wanting to fight for their marriage with watching his own parents’ successful one.
His parents were married for more than 60 years before Meara died in 2015. Jerry Stiller died in 2020 at 92 years old.
“And I love Christine, I love my family, and I was not ready to just go, ‘OK, enough of this,’” he said, admitting that he is still a bit of a workaholic — most of his interview involved his recent directing work on the Apple TV+ hit “Severance” — but he says he’s found more work-life balance.
“Sometimes I have to be pulled from it,” he admitted of his work. “I also really love hanging out with my family and Christine and having fun together. So I’m happy that I didn’t totally miss the boat on that.”
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Taylor told Drew Barrymore in 2023 that although the couple had gotten married and had children fast after meeting each other, “family was always a priority.”
But after they got bogged down with their careers, they “began to grow in different directions.”
She said their time apart — although they continued to do things as a family together — was as helpful as when they came back together during COVID.
“But when the pandemic hit and we all had to figure out where to hunker down, we all ended up in our house together with two teenagers and we found this way back,” she explained. “We had so much time to talk, there were no other distractions. So, it was a really special time for us, for the family…it just happened organically.”
She said things are “so good” between them now.
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“I feel like when you’ve lived a lifetime with someone, and you know we have, and there’s history, we learned as we were going along, together,” she said. “And I think there’s just a freedom in that, there’s a freedom in the comfort of this relationship and the commitment…And knowing that we also have to take care of ourselves.”
