<\/p>\n
The Zoolander star, 59, directed and starred in the adaptation of James Thurber\u2019s 1939 short story.<\/p>\n
In his new Apple TV documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Stiller examines his relationship with his own parents, the acclaimed comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.<\/p>\n
He 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 what would have been her film debut.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cut you out of Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’s 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 \u201cdidn’t make sense in the movie.\u201d<\/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 is also featured 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, and just hearing them talk about it 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.independent.ie \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Zoolander star, 59, directed and starred in the adaptation of James Thurber\u2019s 1939 short story. In his new Apple TV documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Stiller examines his relationship with his own parents, the acclaimed comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. He also reckons with how his experiences growing up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2090108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2090107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Ben-Stiller-admits-\u2018worst-decision-of-his-life-was-cutting.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2090107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2090109,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090107\/revisions\/2090109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2090108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2090107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2090107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2090107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}