Ben Stiller's temporary separation from his wife, Christine Taylor, made the actor feel as though he couldn't "live up" to his parents' six-decade marriage.
Stiller, the youngest child of late comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, tackles his marriage in upcoming Apple TV+ documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, where he draws a comparison between his parents and him and Taylor.
Stiller and Taylor married in 2000 and have two children together.
Stiller and Taylor have starred in several movies together, including Zoolander and Trophic Thunder. When discussing the start of his relationship, Stiller recalled thinking, "I don't want to become my parents," per People.
Taylor mentioned that her husband might have felt "fear" and an "extra strain" in being in a public relationship like his parents. In 2017, Stiller and Taylor separated, which the Nutcrackers star thought made him a letdown.
"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," Stiller told his wife in the documentary.
In January, Stiller told The New York Times that he was "grateful" to have reconnected with his wife.
"When we separated, it was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship, how much I loved our family unit," he said. "It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected. In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together."
By 2022, the couple had reconciled, with the pandemic allowing them time to sort out their differences.
“All of a sudden we were together in the house, and during that time I started to make the movie, too," Stiller said. "So there's sort of this coming together. Us talking about what we were going through, our issues, and looking at what my parents had been through, too, in a way I hadn’t looked at it before."