On Sunday, Ben Stiller debuted his newest film Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, a documentary about his late parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, at the New York Film Festival. While the project mainly revolves around his parents’ professional and personal relationships, Stiller reflects on his own experiences with his wife Christine Taylor, who he married in 2000 and separated from in 2017. Luckily, this all has a happy ending — the couple reportedly got back together during the pandemic after spending years apart.
In the documentary, both Stiller and Taylor open up about their reconciliation. Apparently, their separation made Stiller feel like a failure compared to his parents, who had what he called an “incredible 50 plus year marriage.” Then, when the pandemic first began, Stiller moved back into their family home so he could be closer to their children, Ella and Quinlin, during lockdown. “All of a sudden we were together in the house and during that time I started to make the movie too. So there 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,” he said in the documentary, according to People.
“I do feel like there was history and I think a lot of it was your experience of what that ultimately meant for a relationship; that it could put extra strain when you’re eating, sleeping, breathing each other in that way,” Taylor said, per People. “I also felt like there was a fear from you for me of what that would look like to the outside world. I mean, it was very loaded.”
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Earlier this year, Stiller told the New York Times that they had spent almost a year living together before they actually rekindled their romance. “I’m so grateful for it, and I think not that many people do come back together when they separate,” he said. “There’s nothing like that, when you come back. You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.”
Taylor also previously opened up about their situation in March 2023 on The Drew Barrymore Show, saying that they had been at an impasse when they decided to go their separate ways. “I think we have these growth spurts, even as adults, and I feel like we needed just some time to figure that out,” she said. Well, it looks like their time apart paid off. How’s that for a Hollywood love story?
