Ben Stiller no longer over-analyzes what draws him to a project. Why bother? For almost four decades as an actor and filmmaker, he has consistently topped the box office and skillfully captured the cultural pulse, creating some of pop culture’s most memorable cinematic moments—be it with a stuck zipper, a signature lip pout, or facing Robert De Niro as a formidable father-in-law.
So, when he first began filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after his father, Jerry Stiller, passed away in 2020, he wasn’t entirely sure of his exact motives. “It was just this instinct,” he recalled. Part of it was born from a desire for preservation; the five-bedroom Upper West Side apartment was his childhood home and was slated to be sold. Up until the very last possible moment, he recorded video tours of the memento-filled, and later emptied, rooms where he and his older sister, Amy Stiller, had grown up. They performed skits, did homework, bickered, and celebrated alongside Jerry and their mother, Anne Meara, who had passed in 2015.
Moreover, he wished to memorialize Jerry and Anne—better known as Stiller and Meara during their performing prime. This legendary comedic duo soared from the club circuit to household fame during the Ed Sullivan era. They served as a bridge from the mid-century Borscht Belt comedy style to one crafted for television. For an audience of 30 million viewers, they accentuated their real-life identities as a husband and wife from different cultural and religious backgrounds, at a time when interfaith marriages were still unusual. At home, they tirelessly perfected their routines, honing the precise timing that their son, who turns 60 in November, absorbed and infused into his own work.
Ben Stiller quickly realized that he should create a documentary about them. The film, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” which premieres in theaters this Friday and streams on October 24 on Apple TV, delves into their rich comedic lineage. This legacy is one Stiller has redefined as the star of billion-dollar blockbuster series like “Night at the Museum” and “Meet the Parents” (he is currently filming its fourth installment), and as the director and co-writer of satires such as “Tropic Thunder” and “Zoolander.”
[Image: A black-and-white portrait shows a man in a polo shirt with one arm raised standing next to a white wall where his shadow can be seen.]
Ben Stiller’s documentary about his parents, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” delves into “territory that I haven’t really traveled in before.”
The project is also part family history, or perhaps therapy, as Stiller and his relatives explore what it was like growing up backstage or on sets with parents who were sometimes absent. However, the underlying message (and often the explicit one) of the documentary is more fundamental: it examines what it truly means to lead an artistic life—a profoundly ambitious, often all-consuming path—while simultaneously nurturing a family. This is a tension Stiller has only recently fully confronted, and he did so while filming, with his own children.
The moment his teenage son starkly tells him, onscreen, that he didn’t feel fatherhood was Stiller’s top priority, delivers an emotional punch of epic proportions.
“As a filmmaker I was like, OK, this is a good moment for the movie,” Stiller reflected after the documentary’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. “As a person I was like: That sucks.”
The project is almost agonizingly personal— “territory that I haven’t really traveled in before,” Stiller shared during a recent Saturday evening interview in Manhattan. The documentary took five years to complete; he initially avoided delving into some of the more vulnerable details, and later wondered what his parents might have thought of it when he did. He admitted he wasn’t sure what the film’s reception would be. But “it doesn’t really matter,” he added. “It’s something I needed to make.”
As Stiller has traversed between comedy and more serious themes, his films and shows have subtly shaped culture for a generation, from “Reality Bites,” his defining directorial debut in 1994, to “Severance,” the Emmy-winning Apple TV series he currently produces and often directs. (He is overseeing the show’s third season, though other commitments will prevent him from directing.)
His friend Chris Rock, a co-star in the animated “Madagascar” series, who has known Stiller since the 90s, hailed him as “my hero” and “one of the greatest comic actors to ever live.” As a filmmaker, Rock finds him an inspiration: “I’m trying to get wherever he’s at. It’s so far ahead, I can’t even see it.”
In terms of career chapters, “Reality Bites” and “Severance” are stylistically worlds apart. Stiller mentioned that the series appealed to him because it cleverly embeds a sci-fi thriller—about a corporation whose employees agree to split themselves into “innies” (at the office) and “outies” (at home)—within the familiar structure of a workplace sitcom.
How do we truly value our work? And how do the important people around us fit into that equation? These are questions Stiller consistently revisits. Even the enormous success of “Meet the Parents” partly hinges on whether Robert De Niro’s stoic, Silent Generation character considers nursing a suitable profession for Stiller’s character. His most successful satires, like “Zoolander,” which lampoons the fashion industry, critique industries with profoundly distorted value systems.
And in “Reality Bites,” when Winona Ryder’s character contemplates how to build her nascent filmmaking career and choose a romantic partner, she asks the very same question Stiller explores as he tells the story of his parents, who by most accounts achieved success: How do you build a productive life as an artist and a partner?
[Image: An archival image shows Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller with their children Ben, center, and Amy, posed in front of a brick wall.]
Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller with their children Ben, center, and Amy, in an image from the documentary. Credit: Apple TV, via Associated Press
STILLER’S PARENTS WERE MARRIED for 61 years. Their union survived the challenges of show business, their distinct creative drives, and Anne’s struggle with alcohol, which caused family instability. Stiller worried about including this in the documentary, but, he noted, “she talked about it a lot, and she evolved.”
“They were pretty great parents,” he affirmed.
The depth of their relationship and its longevity was a lesson he grasped late in life. “The career stuff falls away,” he observed, “you get older, and you’re left with the real stuff in your life. And for them, they were there for each other. And that’s what I want, at the end of the day.”
This personal awakening came to Stiller in the last decade, a few years after he was successfully treated for aggressive prostate cancer. In 2017, he announced a separation from his wife, actress Christine Taylor. However, during the pandemic, they reconciled and began living together again in New York. This allowed him to be present for their son, Quinlin Stiller, now 20 and a college student, and their daughter, Ella Stiller, 23, a Juilliard-trained actress. (Rock quipped: “A marriage getting back together is harder to do than a $600 million movie.”)
And Stiller realized—prompted by his children—that despite his vows to be more present than his own parents, he was often emotionally distant. Including this candid admission in the film is almost unheard-of for Hollywood figures, but, he stated, “I admit it because it’s true.”
He became visibly emotional. “To actually have, now, a real relationship with them, I feel very fortunate,” he said, “because it took me a while to really understand the work that you have to put in, to make that happen.”
WHEN HE’S ONSCREEN, STILLER—often as a put-upon Everyman—guides his audience through significant life questions with a relatable fallibility. “He makes making a mistake look good,” observed Adam Scott, a star of “Severance” and his co-star in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (2013), Stiller’s underappreciated passion project. “Like, I hope my mistakes land as well as his.”
This effect is partly because his onscreen missteps are often designed for comedic effect. Scott recalled that when they started making “Severance,” both he and Stiller were grappling with the recent death of a parent. The show inherently explores themes of grief and loss, Scott noted, but without Stiller’s unique sense of humor, “it would be a tough watch.” He added, “The things that he finds funny about it—about the world, about the characters—is really different than anyone else.”
Scott further elaborated that “the most Ben Stiller” scene in the series appears in the Season 2 finale. It features the loyalist manager Milchick engaged in a pre-recorded conversation with an animatronic version of the company’s founder, Keir. “But the timing is really off,” Scott explained, “and the head makes a particular noise when it turns.” Stiller was directing that scene and personally controlling Keir’s movements.
“I think that he really thinks the Abraham Lincoln robot at Disneyland is very funny,” Scott mused. “I have never seen him happier. He was positively giddy on set that day.”
Stiller’s transformation of comedy is undeniable. His highly influential sketch program, “The Ben Stiller Show,” which won an Emmy for best writing in 1993—remarkably, *after* it was canceled after just one season—elevated Bob Odenkirk to an on-camera presence and gave Judd Apatow his first professional job. The program’s stylistically faithful parodies became a comedic blueprint, and Apatow later credited Stiller for shaping his own improv-heavy directing style. Even “The Cable Guy,” Stiller’s critically maligned directorial follow-up to “Reality Bites,” has since been reevaluated: It helped introduce what we now call cringe comedy.
[Image: A black-and-white portrait shows a man turned away from the camera and looking up next to his shadow on the white background.]
Stiller isn’t sure what viewers will make of the documentary about his parents. But “it doesn’t really matter. It’s something I needed to make.”
Though his wife teases him about it, Stiller often claims he doesn’t consider himself a comedian. “If someone says, like, your dad or you, who’s funny? My dad’s funnier,” he told me, initiating the comparison himself, as we sat in an empty cafe in Chelsea Piers. Dressed entirely in black, his face was serious, angular. Eliciting a smile or laugh from him felt like a small triumph.
Jerry Stiller, his son recalled, was “genuinely funny”—though he meticulously refined every line throughout his life. Even when the elder Stiller, in his late 60s, became a viewer favorite as George Costanza’s pugnacious father on “Seinfeld,” his scripts “had meticulous annotations in the margins,” according to Journey Gunderson, executive director of the National Comedy Center, where Stiller donated his parents’ papers. “He was never just coming in, delivering what was written.”
In contrast, Meara, who started in theater, had an easier knack for delivering a punchline, her son notes in the documentary. Yet, she was drawn to drama and later became a playwright. (She also famously appeared as Steve’s mother in “Sex and the City.”) Stiller admits that, like his mother, humor has “never been what’s really driving me.”
BUT YES, OF COURSE, HE KNOWS how to be funny. It was foundational to his youth—filled with distinctive voices and comedic bits. (In one recurring improv, Ben was a mean acting teacher, and his father was the oldest student in class.) When their parents were away working, and Stiller and his sister were in the care of their longtime nanny, Hazel Hugh, they planned elaborate living-room productions: a number from “Shenandoah” or “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a little Shakespeare, or a full nightclub act. Mom and Dad’s return was always opening night; the ovations were epic.
By the time Ben was 13, he had a camera—a gift from his father—and a subscription to American Cinematographer magazine. “He did, like, these blood-and-gut films with the kids from the neighborhood, with murder in the park,” Amy recounted.
Yet Stiller and Meara’s frequent absences weighed heavily, too. “I remember him talking about, ‘Sometimes the only time I would see my parents is when they were on “The Ed Sullivan Show,”’” recalled Jerry Stahl, Ben’s friend, novelist, and screenwriter.
Stiller and Meara appeared on the variety show 36 times, always with new material. As a child, Stiller said, he had only an inkling of what it meant for his parents to forge that kind of career. But in making the documentary, which uses archival footage of their performances, and hundreds of hours of audio and videotapes his father made of their work and family life, it struck him: “Oh my God, look what they were doing; look how hard that was.” He added that creating new sketches as a couple every five or six weeks for a massive live television audience was not something he could imagine doing. He also emphasized the added pressure of “having to raise two kids and having to make it work—their livelihood was dependent on that, because by doing well on that show, that would open up all the other doors for them.”
They not only succeeded, they also revolutionized comedic norms. Most comedy duos typically involve a hierarchy, with one being the clown and the other the straight man, explained Gunderson of the National Comedy Center. However, the Stiller and Meara partnership “was built on an equal push and pull. Both artists were capable of driving laughs and the momentum of the sketch.”
Their act redefined gender dynamics, and cultural ones—by openly portraying their own interfaith marriage (Stiller was Jewish, and Meara, though raised Catholic, later converted to Judaism), notably without making Jewishness the punchline, Gunderson pointed out. “They put their lived reality on national television—they made it not only normal, but hilarious and warm. You can feel empathy in the routines.” (The museum will begin displaying selections from their collection on October 24.)
Christopher Walken, a star in “Severance,” first encountered Stiller and Meara as a young performer in New York. “When I saw the family together, you could tell they all really liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company,” he shared. “Jerry and Anne would host these marvelous New Year’s Eve parties, and you’d see all these actors. There’d be a huge pile of coats on the bed. They knew everybody.”
He became close with Jerry, describing him as “a beautiful guy, kind, generous,” but admitted he was “a little scared” of Anne: “I always had the feeling she knew what I was up to at all times. I was a little wild.”
Walken also co-starred with Ben Stiller in his 1986 Broadway debut, “The House of Blue Leaves,” and was impressed by his talent even then. “It’s not just his ambition, it’s his talent,” Walken observed. “You look at a young person, and you can see that they’ve got everything it takes.”
AS A DIRECTOR, STILLER HAD a reputation for being—to put it mildly—intense, a meticulous perfectionist known for marathon script revision sessions and round-the-clock calls to perfect even the smallest details. “He really makes it hard for himself,” noted Stahl, whom Stiller portrayed as a drug-addicted writer in “Permanent Midnight” (1998). “So he’ll do one project that seems miraculous and impossible, and then he’ll find something harder.”
This work ethic was clearly inherited. “My mother’s standard for what was good or what was hacky was something I really took in,” Stiller explained. The documentary includes footage of a pre-performance Jerry, intensely focused. Scott described it as “a mirror to Ben on set, when he is focusing in and trying to work something out.”
[Image: A black-and-white image shows a man in a polo shirt and dark slacks turning to face the camera. He’s standing against a background that’s partly in shadow but otherwise white.]
“Severance” is at its core about grief and loss, said Adam Scott, but without Stiller’s sense of humor, “it would be a tough watch.”
Stiller remains a demanding filmmaker, often requiring numerous takes. However, he is now more mindful of the impact his expectations have on others. A few years ago, he admits, “I was not as aware of the impact that I would have on people. I learned through experiences—and from people letting me know.” Age also provided perspective, “and being humbled a little bit in life.” (A significant turning point was the box office failure of “Zoolander 2,” released in 2016.)
For most of his career, Stiller confessed, “I found safety in the work.” He still feels most content when deeply engaged in his many projects. Yet, as friends and colleagues attest, he has “chilled out.” Stahl observed, “He’s come around now. Family is a priority.”
Reflecting on his parents’ lives has fundamentally shifted his perspective on his own, in ways he found surprising and which will likely appear in future onscreen work. “It’s actually, creatively, what I want to be doing,” Stiller shared. “It’s made me want to delve more into those memories. Because I feel like that is stuff that is really worth exploring, to figure out, in myself.”