Ben Stiller Recalls Feeling ‘Lost’ During His Separation From Christine Taylor

In his new documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Stiller takes a closer look at his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s relationship, comparing their marriage to his and Christine’s.

Both couples worked together early on in their relationships; Jerry and Anne met while filming TV pilot, Heat Vision and Jack, while Ben and Christine started as love interests in Zoolander a year after they got married in 2000; the pair also starred alongside each other on Dodgeball in 2004.

Ben looked at the toll working with your partner took on a relationship, noting how his parents had their comedy act Stiller and Meara, which took them around the country and on The Ed Sullivan Show.

“I don’t want to become my parents,” Ben recalled thinking, per People when comparing his relationship with Christine to theirs.

“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,” Christine said. “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.”

Ben and Christine split in May 2017 after nearly two decades of marriage.

“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. Our priority will continue to be raising our children as devoted parents and the closest of friends. We kindly ask that the media respect our privacy at this time,” they said in a statement at the time.

The split caused Ben to think he was 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,” Ben told Christine in the doc.

During the time the actors went their separate ways Ben felt his career was in a steady place, however, when it came to his personal life he felt “lost” without Christine.

“My career had been going along for a long time but things actually weren’t great in my personal life,” Ben said of the separation. “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.”

The actors — who wed in 2000 and share two kids, daughter Ella, 22, and son Quinlin, 19 — separated in 2017, but reconciled during the pandemic, after they’d moved back in together.

“I don’t know where Christine was, you’d have to ask her, but COVID put us all together in the same house,” the Severance director explained to The New York Times in January, noting it was “almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together” again.

In the documentary he recalled thinking of his parents’ relationship when he and Christine split.

“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 said, adding, “I think I wanted to somehow understand how they did it.”

The couple announced they were getting back together in 2022.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost will screen in select theaters beginning on October 17 and will be available to stream Apple TV+ on October 24.