Ben Stiller has been through Hollywood highs, comedy classics, and more Zoolander faces than most of us can manage in a lifetime, but for a while, the funnyman wasn’t laughing. The 59-year-old actor and director admits he hit a wall long before the world hit pause in 2020. “My career had been going along for a long time, but things actually weren’t great in my personal life,” he says in his new Apple TV+ documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost. “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.”
Back in 2017, Ben Stiller and his wife, actress Christine Taylor, called time on their 18-year marriage. Their joint statement was heartbreakingly polite: “With tremendous love and respect for each other, and the 18 years we spent together as a couple, we have made the decision to separate.” For fans, it looked like another Hollywood marriage folding under pressure. For Stiller, it felt like failure. “When we separated my feeling was like, ‘Oh, I’m failing at this,’” he admits. He couldn’t help but compare himself to his parents, comedy legends Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, whose marriage lasted over 60 years. “Look at my parents—they had this incredible marriage, and I can’t live up to that.”
The separation was meant to give them space. What it gave them, unexpectedly, was perspective. “It was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship,” he told The New York Times. “It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected.” Then came 2020, the year that forced everyone to stay home—and for Stiller and Taylor, it turned out to be divine timing. “Covid put us all together in the same house,” he said. When the interviewer called it “an act of God,” Stiller agreed.
Living under the same roof again wasn’t some instant rom-com reunion. “It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together,” Stiller revealed. “But I’m so grateful for it.” The spark reignited, and by 2022, the couple quietly confirmed they were back on. “In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together,” he said. Taylor echoed the sentiment during a 2023 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show: “We found this way back. We had so much time to talk. There were no other distractions.”
Stiller credits their second act to something simple yet difficult: commitment. “You just have to want to be together and want to make it work,” he told E! News. “It’s about valuing the relationship.” It’s a philosophy that echoes through his documentary, which explores his parents’ bond both on and off the stage. Watching how Jerry and Anne fought, forgave, and kept showing up for each other gave Stiller a roadmap for his own marriage.
These days, he seems grounded. Ben Stiller is back with Christine Taylor, close with their two kids—Ella, 23, and Quinlin, 20—and reflective about what matters most. “There’s nothing like that, when you come back,” he said. “You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.”
If Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is about legacy, Ben’s real legacy might be this: learning that grace sometimes shows up in the form of second chances—and yes, maybe even an act of God.
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