Ben Stiller was the latest guest on The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast and admitted that he still doesn’t understand why he became such a popular comedy movie star in the late 1990s and 2000s. His self-directed work in 1996’s “The Cable Guy” was followed by the one-two punch of 1999’s “There’s Something About Mary” and 2000’s “Meet the Parents,” both of which grossed more than $330 million at the worldwide box office and turned Stiller into a blockbuster actor.
“I remember opening up the L.A. Times and there was this writer who wrote a letter: ‘Dear God, stop putting Ben Stiller in comedies,’” Stiller said about this period of his career. “I was just like, I don’t know, I’m here, I love doing what I do. But it’s only in retrospect that I can go, ‘Wow, there was a thing happening that I was fortunate to be a part of.’ But I don’t know what the zeitgeist was. You can look at 2000s comedies, and they were a specific kind of thing, a tone, and there were a lot of great things in those comedies that we don’t have now. I don’t know if you could recreate that.”
Stiller’s film success ignited off the back of his acclaimed television work on “The Ben Stiller Show,” which only started when he decided to leave his gig at “Saturday Night Live” after just four episodes. Stiller joined the NBC sketch comedy series as a writer and featured performer in 1989. He remembered “SNL” boss Lorne Michaels reacting to the news by saying: “Ben’s going to do what Ben’s going to do.”
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“I knew that I couldn’t do well there because I wasn’t great at live performing,” Stiller said about his “SNL” exit. “I got too nervous. I didn’t enjoy it and I wanted to be making short films. So in the moment, there were reasons, and I had this opportunity to do this MTV show [‘The Ben Stiller Show’]. It had been my dream to be on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but looking back on it, I don’t remember exactly how I had the gumption, but for whatever reason, I followed that instinct.”
Stiller told The Times that he’s never been too strategic through his career. For instance, he decided to star in “Night at the Museum” not because he thought it’d kick off a new franchise but simply because “I grew up near the natural-history museum, and I thought, ‘If I was a kid, I’d love this’ and it would be fun to do.”
“Night at the Museum” did became a franchise for Stiller, a hugely successful one at that with $1.3 billion earned across three movies. While the motives for doing sequels becomes more corporate, Still said that all three movies were fun to do.
“I’m not going to not want to work with Robin Williams or Shawn Levy,” Stiller said about making the third “Night of the Museum” film. “The only part of it that was nagging at me is, I liked to do other kinds of movies as a filmmaker and I never really stopped to make the time to do that.”
As for the philosophy that now guides his career, Stiller said: “I’m at this point in my life, do I really want to take this chance right now? How much do I care about what the quote unquote bad result is? You care a little less about that. The day after something doesn’t do well or if it gets bad reviews, it’s not like anything in your life has changed. It’s just how you feel. You feel embarrassed or you feel like, ‘Damn, I wanted to be the winner.’ But winning doesn’t always happen. It usually doesn’t happen. So how do you live with that?
Stiller has been making the press rounds in support of “Severance” Season 2, which launches Jan. 17 on Apple TV+. Head over to The Times’ website to read Stiller’s full discussion on “The Interview” podcast.