Ben Stiller still struggles to wrap his head around why he was such a beloved comedy movie star in the late 1990s and 2000s.
The actor-producer-director, who reached a new level of success thanks to his comedic roles in There’s Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, Tropic Thunder and Zoolander, among others, recently looked back on that time in his career during a recent conversation on The New York Times‘ podcast The Interview. However, he also recalled not everyone being his biggest fan.
“I remember opening up the L.A. Times, and there was this writer who wrote a letter: ‘Dear God, stop putting Ben Stiller in comedies,’” he recounted. “I was just like, I don’t know, I’m here, I love doing what I do.”
Overall, Stiller is thankful he was able to be a part of that chapter in movie history, adding, “It’s only in retrospect that I can go, ‘Wow, there was a thing happening that I was fortunate to be a part of.’ But I don’t know what the zeitgeist was. You can look at 2000s comedies, and they were a specific kind of thing, a tone, and there were a lot of great things in those comedies that we don’t have now. I don’t know if you could re-create that.”
After departing Saturday Night Live after just four episodes in 1989 because he felt he “wasn’t great at live performing,” Stiller later garnered an audience with his MTV series, The Ben Stiller Show. He continued that momentum with his string of hit comedies.
When the Times later asked if the Severance producer-director was ever strategic in his career decisions, the actor responded, “I don’t think so, because I don’t think I’m that smart.”
He added, “I would make decisions. I remember very clearly: Night at the Museum was a decision because I grew up near the natural history museum, and I thought, ‘If I was a kid, I’d love this and it would be fun to do.’”
While 2006’s Night at the Museum became a blockbuster hit for Stiller, his reasoning for continuing the franchise with two sequels in 2009 and 2014 changed over time. However, he still enjoyed getting to make the movies.
“At that point you’ve got a team together, and those were all fun to do, and I’m not going to not want to work with Robin Williams or Shawn Levy,” he explained. “But when I was in that period, I don’t think I had the ability to hover over it. A lot of actors and filmmakers do have that ability. The only part of it that was nagging at me is I liked to do other kinds of movies as a filmmaker and I never really stopped to make the time to do that.”
