When Ben Stiller was 8, he visited his father, Jerry, on the set of the movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and experienced a kind of epiphany. In the 1974 thriller set in the New York City subway, Jerry, who would enjoy a late-career resurgence 20 years later as Seinfeld‘s Frank Costanza, was playing a transit cop alongside Walter Matthau, and Ben was visiting during a night shoot, as lights on giant cranes shone down on the slick city streets around the Triborough Bridge.
“It was so cool, so cool,” says Stiller, now 59, recalling the scene as he looks out from the offices of his Red Hour Productions in the West Village in mid-January, over a sweeping view of the Hudson River. It’s the same view he had as a child at his family’s apartment on Riverside Drive some 70 blocks north. Jerry and actress Anne Meara, Ben’s mother, were one of the most successful male-female comedy duos of all time who regularly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Not long after visiting his dad on set, teen Ben, a budding cinephile, would have his own subscription to American Cinematographer, a shelf of making-of film books and a start-of-production announcement for the 1980 Blues Brothers movie that he ripped out of one of his parents’ copies of Variety taped to his bedroom wall. “Growing up, there was always performing going on in the house,” Stiller says. “But for me, I was gravitating toward the camera and everything that went on around the image.”
Stiller’s latest project, executive producing and directing the majority of episodes of the Apple TV+ show Severance, which began its second season Jan. 17, is the fulfillment of that childhood obsession. The show exemplifies a certain kind of storytelling, a genre-straddling project with tension, drama and humor that was common on the big screen during the ’70s and has mainly been found on television over the past decade, in programs like Better Call Saul, Fargo and Stiller’s own 2018 limited series, Escape at Dannemora. It’s the kind of thing 12-year-old Ben wanted to make, and that grown-up Ben might have made earlier if not for a minor detour he took as a global comedy star in films like There’s Something About Mary and Zoolander and franchises like Meet the Parents and Night at the Museum.
The first season of Severance, which premiered in 2022 at the height of the Great Resignation, became a zeitgeist-riding hit thanks to creator Dan Erickson’s absurdist take on work-life balance, in which characters voluntarily undergo a surgical procedure to separate their consciousness between home and work. It was Stiller’s decades of industry relationships that got the show made and his creative ambition and Kubrickian visual style that helped it collect 14 Emmy nominations, including outstanding drama series and outstanding director for Stiller, and win a Peabody Award. The new season comes after a long, nearly three-year wait for fans, and amid costly rewrites and reshoots that Stiller, a notorious perfectionist, wanted. It’s a bet that seems to have paid off with critics — the show is at 98 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes — and audiences. While Apple TV+, like most streamers, doesn’t share detailed viewing data, Severance has topped multiple third-party rankings since its season two premiere.
“What Ben is doing now is the opposite of resting on your laurels,” says Judd Apatow, a longtime Stiller collaborator who co-created The Ben Stiller Show, the early ’90s sketch comedy series Stiller wrote, directed and starred in, and produced 1996’s The Cable Guy, which Stiller directed. “It’s creating a whole new design for your career. But I do think somewhere in Ben’s mind, this was always the plan.”
The praise comes at a moment when Stiller has — finally, he says — stopped looking for it. Instead, he has turned inward in the past few years, spurred in part by the process of making a documentary about his parents. Meara died in 2015, Jerry in 2020, and Ben has been quietly working on the film, which Apple will release later this year, for four years. “At first it was, ‘I just want to make a movie about my parents and I don’t want to be in it,’ ” Stiller says. “And then it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, I have to be a part of this because if I’m making this movie, I have to be honest about my point of view.’ That’s more uncomfortable. Then you have to look at yourself.”
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The Severance season one finale ended with a cliffhanger in April of 2022, and viewers have been clamoring to find out what happened to its main characters, especially Adam Scott’s Mark and his colleagues at the shadowy Lumon Industries. It was after the release of season one that Stiller learned fans considered Severance a mystery box show, a genre of high-concept shows like Lost and Stranger Things that feature enigmatic stories that are expected to tie together eventually. “I’d never heard the term mystery box show until two years ago,” Stiller says. “They’re like, ‘So you’re making a mystery.’ I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m not prepared for this.’ But what I got out of that was that people don’t want to be led down a path or be messed with. With a show like this, there’s always that question, ‘Do they know where they’re going?’ ” Over the years, even the show’s cast have sometimes had to roll with the eccentric creative vision, relying on Stiller to explain it. “I found it very hard to understand the tone early on in season one, but I trusted Ben,” says Patricia Arquette, who played the boss in season one and whom Stiller directed in Escape at Dannemora. “Eventually he cut together footage to show me an example.” Severance fans will be relieved to know that Stiller, Erickson and the show’s writers do in fact have a plan, that even some of season one’s weirdest flourishes — yes, even the basement full of baby goats — pay off by the end of season two.
Thanks to a break in production for the 2023 Hollywood strikes, Stiller got to spend a lot of time tinkering with season two. While work was halted for writers and actors, Stiller, as a non-writing producer, was editing the first seven episodes and noticing things he wanted to change, particularly around building out the backstories of Scott and Arquette’s characters, notes that necessitated the rewrites and reshoots. “If you have the ability to look at the whole and go back and fix things that you think need to be fixed or address questions that bother you, that’s really important,” Stiller says. The show had undergone a similar retooling on season one thanks to a break imposed by COVID. Puck reported that this season of Severance approached the price tag of $20 million per episode. Stiller declines to state a budget for the show, saying: “Both seasons have been interrupted by these force majeure things that threw everything upside down, so it’s never had a regular season where you could just say, ‘Yeah, this is what it is.’ But we never have looked at it like, ‘Oh, whatever it takes.’ It’s really been figuring out how to make the show in the best and the most cost-efficient way.” Apple TV+has reason to be forgiving of a costly show — season one of Severance generated more than $200 million for the service in new subscribers, especially internationally, according to Parrott Analytics.
Severance is Erickson’s brainchild, its concept inspired by a mind-numbing job he once had at a door factory, a backstory that yields a fun Easter egg for superfans in season two, when Zach Cherry’s Dylan goes for a job interview at a company called Great Doors. (Interviewer: “If you could be any kind of door, what would you be?” Dylan: “Pocket.”) Erickson submitted the pilot to Red Hour in 2016 as a writing sample. At the time of his first face-to-face with Stiller, the unknown writer was still driving for Postmates. “I remember stopping for a doughnut before the meeting and thinking, ‘OK, just don’t humiliate yourself in a way that will haunt you for the rest of your life,’ ” Erickson says. “But by the end of the meeting, I actually believed this was something that could happen. Once Ben got involved, everything changed. Suddenly all these doors that I assumed would never open started opening.”
Stiller cast Scott, whom he had directed in a small part in his 2013 adventure comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in the complex lead role of Mark, which alternates between a grieving, widowed home persona, or “outie,” and a naive and chipper work persona, or “innie.” Stiller ended up having to battle Apple to cast Scott, who was best known for NBC’s Parks and Recreation. “I couldn’t really blame [Apple] at the time,” Scott says. “I was thought of as more of a comedic person, and it’s a big swing.” Of Stiller’s advocacy through the casting process, Scott says: “I’ve never experienced anything like that before in show business. No one’s ever stuck their neck out for me like that.” For Stiller, Scott’s background on a workplace comedy was part of his appeal. “So much of the show is based in The Office and Parks and Rec and Office Space, and that genre,” Stiller says. “The humor in the script that Dan wrote was in that world but had this other layer to it. Casting was about figuring out who could handle that.” The cast is rounded out by a mix of well known faces, like John Turturro and Christopher Walken as Lumon employees; people with comedic experience, like Cherry; as well as lesser known actors like Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman and Jen Tullock. The new season also features Game of Thrones‘ Gwendoline Christie in a small but memorable role.
One sequence in the new season requires Scott to rapidly transition between his innie and outie characters over and over again. It’s a crucial scene upon which the whole story arc hangs, and making it was, Stiller says, “mind-numbing.” “We got to the set like five days before shooting, and every time we’d start to rehearse it, we’d start to rewrite it,” Stiller says. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, no, no, he should say this.’ ” Eventually, Scott was left with a weekend to learn 15 mostly new pages of dialogue. Asked about Stiller’s demanding process, Scott says, “I would certainly hope someone who’s guiding this particular ship would be exacting. I know I can trust Ben because he does have his eye on every little thing.” After they finished the sequence, Stiller says, “I remember going, ‘Oh my God, this thing is 17 or 18 minutes long. I hope this is interesting.’ “
Apple has yet to officially confirm a third season of Severance, but Stiller says there is a writers room underway in L.A. and that he hopes not to keep audiences waiting three years this time. Hollywood budgets have tightened since Apple greenlit the show, but Stiller expects to keep Severance moving forward with the same polish. “Everything changed a lot after the strike, for everyone, in terms of the way people are looking at budgets and spending,” Stiller says. “To Apple’s credit, they stayed on track with what the show was, and they’ve supported it.” Matt Cherniss, head of programming at Apple TV+, calls the show “an incredible success story in every way imaginable.” In a sign of just how much Apple likes Severance, the tech company’s CEO, Tim Cook, appeared in an ad for the new season as severed employee “Tim C,” even delivering the signature eye flutter that actors perform when their characters transform from outie to innie. “Some people draw comparisons between Apple and the show that are totally coincidental, from the visuals to corporate culture stuff,” Stiller says. “They get the joke.”
Stiller says he has had no desire to cast himself as a character in Severance, but he has been wearing his fame comfortably during the marketing of the show, recording his cast on his iPhone like a proud dad during a clever marketing stunt that re-created the Lumon cubicles inside New York’s Grand Central Station and applauding from the audience of Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live as Andy Cohen interviewed Arquette and Christie. On the night of this interview, he is heading to a show of a Brooklyn indie rock band called Been Stellar, who have been inviting him, their namesake, to see them play for years.
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The core idea of Severance, a show about characters who surgically separate work and home, is the exact opposite of the kind of lifestyle in which Stiller was raised. “My parents’ creative process was always happening around the house because they had to write and perform together,” he says. “The good part of that was it was very creative, and that was encouraged; and the flip side was there was less of a separation, so work and home kind of melded into one thing, and the stress of that.” He emerged from that home ambitious and intense, with a head start on his peers at understanding the difficulties of navigating a long-term career in the entertainment business.
Stiller attended film school at UCLA for a year and made a 12-minute parody of Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money that caught the attention of Saturday Night Live. In 1989, at age 23, he briefly became a writer and featured performer at SNL before doing something his colleague on the staff, Bob Odenkirk, found unthinkable: He quit. “He was ballsy as hell to walk away from SNL and to be able to say with confidence about himself and his career, ‘This isn’t going to work for me. I have to leave here,’ ” Odenkirk says. Stiller says it wasn’t confidence that led him to leave but self-awareness. “I just knew that I wasn’t a great live performer,” he says. “It got me nervous. I get stressed out even thinking about it, and making movies is the opposite of that. You get to do it over and over again.”
At the time, Stiller had an opportunity to do a show for MTV where he could make filmed pieces. The Ben Stiller Show, which ultimately moved to Fox, is where he says he started to really learn to direct, tackling with a meticulous attention to detail the silliest of premises that Odenkirk and others wrote, like a parody called “Manson,” shot in the style of the 1950s Lassie show, in which Charles Manson plays a household pet. “He was very serious about it, solemn,” Odenkirk says of Stiller’s directing at the time. “He was talking about the film stock you were using and the lenses and shit, and that was for fucking parodies for a silly sketch show on Fox.”
Stiller would go on to direct his first feature, the 1994 Gen X classic Reality Bites, in which he also starred and cast his mother in a small part. But he ultimately became better known for his onscreen comedic work in parts like Cameron Diaz’s geeky pursuer in the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary and the beleaguered son-in-law whom a New York Times reviewer called “a hood ornament for anxiety” in Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents. “He was, I’ve got to say, very good at bringing to life an anxious guy who’s put upon and a little powder keg, but who’s just continually taking shit,” Odenkirk says. “Maybe the reason is because Ben was a very internal guy, a quiet guy. He was very thinky and he was keeping a lot stuffed inside.” As an actor, Stiller has appeared in films that have made more than $3 billion at the domestic box office, a remarkable career for someone who was actually aspiring to do something else. “I always knew Ben would be a giant comedy star because he was so hilarious and likable,” Apatow says. “But it’s hard to put two or three years aside to direct a feature film when you are getting offered a series of really good movies to star in. It’s a real sacrifice to that part of your career to take the time to direct.”
Stiller married actress Christine Taylor in 2000, and they appeared together in such projects as Zoolander, Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder and had two children. Stiller’s parents, who were married 60 years, had fought over the role their careers played in their lives. “My dad was committed to turning their relationship into something that they could make a living doing a comedy act about,” Stiller says. “And my mom didn’t really love that as much, but she was really good at it, and that affected their relationship.”
Unwittingly, he says, he began to replicate some of his parents’ dynamic when it came to his relationship with his own career. “You start making movies, and if they don’t go well, that would affect me,” he says. In 2017, he and Taylor separated. During the pandemic, they decided to stay in their home in New York together with their children, and after a period of months, they reunited. “I didn’t expect we were going to get back together,” he says. “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.’ ” Stiller still immerses himself in work, he says: “Sometimes I have to be pulled from it.” But he says he’s found more balance. “I also really love hanging out with my family and Christine and having fun together,” he says. “So I’m happy that I didn’t totally miss the boat on that.”
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Stiller’s kids, Ella, 22, and Quinlin, 19, now want to be actors themselves. “I feel probably what my parents felt,” he says. “I recognize their talent and their desire to do it, and I support it a hundred percent. And I also know it’s a tough business, and as a protective parent, you don’t want your kids to have to suffer the slings and arrows.” Stiller’s children grew up around show business as he did, and their interest pleases him as much as it worries him. “I’m glad that for all of the things that I did wrong as a parent or being too caught up in my work, it’s not like they were like, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this.’ ”
For all of Stiller’s precision on Severance, Odenkirk thinks his friend has mellowed with age. “Whatever criticism anyone has of Ben, he knows it before they do,” Odenkirk says. “That’s a great thing, but a burden when you’re young and you haven’t dealt with any of it. But I think he has dealt with a lot. I think he’s a happier guy, and he’s easier in the world. It’s just hard to go through what we go through and make what we make with the standards that he has.”
Stiller says he’s not clear what his next project will be after the documentary about his parents, but he’d like it to be directing a movie. “It’d be fun to work on a story that’s just like two hours,” he says. In the meantime, he’s having trouble letting go of the doc. “I’m thinking I’m going to miss working on it,” he says. “I have an excuse to just sit and watch my parents all day.”
While sifting through material for the documentary, he came across a Super 8 home movie from when his family went to Spain when he was 6 or 7 and they attended what’s called a bloodless bullfight, in which the bull isn’t hurt. An announcer invited someone from the audience to get in the ring, and Jerry volunteered. In the video, Jerry never touches the bull, but he wields two pokers and narrowly avoids getting charged. “I was like, ‘That’s amazing,’ ” Stiller says. “He was willing to jump in the ring with a bull.”
Stiller sees himself in both of his parents. His sense of humor, he says, is more like his mother’s. But his willingness to jump in the ring, he believes, he inherited from his father. “You have to have something inside of you where you just know — ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m going to do this thing.’ “
This story appeared in the Feb. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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