Ben Stiller 'Wasn't Ready to Just Give Up On' Marriage to Christine Taylor During Separation: 'I Love My Family'

Mar. 15, 2025

Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor on Sept. 5, 2024.Photo:Cindy Ord/Getty

Cindy Ord/Getty

Ben Stilleris reflecting on his how hisparents' relationshiphas affected his own marriage toChristine Taylor.

Stiller, 59, toldThe Hollywood Reporterin an interview published Wednesday, Feb. 5, that he felt he replicated some aspects of his late fatherJerry Stiller’s behavior toward Ben’s late motherAnne Mearain the years after he and Taylor, 53,marriedin 2000.

“You start making movies, and if they don’t go well, that would affect me,” Ben recalled.

He and Taylor, whoshare daughter Ella, 22, and son Quinlin, 19, famouslyseparated in 2017and ultimately reunited as a couple during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “I didn’t expect we were going to get back together,” he toldTHR. “But when we broke up, there was a part of me that wasn’t ready to just give up on it. Probably a certain amount of that is having watched my parents. And I love Christine, I love my family, and I was not ready to just go, ‘OK, enough of this.’ ”

Ben’s parents Jerry and Anne rose to fame in the 1960s as the comedy duo Stiller & Meara. Ben told the outlet that Jerry, who died in 2020 at 92, “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," he added of Meara, who died at 85 in 2015.

Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor on June 11, 2023.Rob Kim/Getty

Rob Kim/Getty

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“Sometimes I have to be pulled from it," he said. “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.”

Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor on Aug. 27, 2024.Gotham/GC

Gotham/GC

Ben most recently recounted how he and Taylor got back together during a Jan. 16 appearance onThe View, in which he said, “I don’t know how it happened other than we both wanted it."

“Now, every day that we’re together,we do not take [it] for granted," he said at the time. “At least, I know I don’t, because you know it could go away and that to me is the gift for our relationship is that we have that every day, and I really am so happy that we’re together.”

source: people.com