his new Apple TV documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost<\/a>, Stiller examines his relationship with his own parents, the acclaimed comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.<\/p>\nHe also reckons with how his experiences growing up with them would later shape him as a father.<\/p>\n
In a discussion about his \u201cperfectionism\u201d, which he believes he inherited from his father, Stiller tells his 23-year-old daughter, Ella, that he struggled to cut her from what would have been her film debut.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cut you out of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It\u2019s probably the worst decision I ever made in my life,\u201d says Stiller.<\/p>\n
In response, Ella tells her father that she was \u201creally scared\u201d during filming, and accepts that the short scene she was in \u201cdidn\u2019t make sense in the movie\u201d.<\/p>\n
![\"Ben](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/GettyImages-2177531780-(1).jpg\")
Ben Stiller and his daughter Ella pictured in New York in October 2024 (Getty for Equality Now)<\/p>\n
Ella had been set to play a younger version of Odessa Mitty, the sister of Stiller\u2019s titular character Walter Mitty. She has since landed film and television credits in projects including And Just Like That… and Happy Gilmore 2.<\/p>\n
Stiller said the decision felt like more than a simple edit, explaining: \u201cFor me, it kind of goes deeper. What it relates to is my own issues with my own obsession with my work, or \u2018perfectionism\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stiller\u2019s 20-year-old son Quin, who also features in the documentary, tells his father that his dedication to his work created distance within the family.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s things, you know, after a tough day or something was going wrong, you can get very much in your own head,\u201d says Quin. \u201cAnd I think, once you kind of go into that place … [it\u2019s] hard to get you out of it. So that would kind of put a damper on the fun part about being on vacation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quin goes on: \u201cYou have all these hats that you\u2019re trying to balance, you know? Being a director, an actor, you know, a producer, a writer… but also, just, like, a father, right? And sometimes I felt that that would come, you know, last to these other things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stiller reflects that he had similar experiences growing up with his own comedy-star parents, and believed he didn\u2019t want to \u201cend up\u201d like them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe irony is, I thought I was doing so much better than my parents. I thought I was pulling it off,\u201d says Stiller. \u201cI was flying home on the weekends and having special places for the kids to play when they come visit the set, but in reality \u2013 and just hearing them talk about it \u2013 for them, it was the same thing I was going through as a kid, and I just couldn\u2019t see that at all at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the documentary, Stiller also reflected on the ups and downs of his marriage to Christine Taylor.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-223977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}