Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller has spent much of his career moving between two sides of comedy: the performer caught in escalating humiliation and the filmmaker carefully engineering the chaos around him. Born in New York City on November 30, 1965, and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he grew up around show business as the son of actors and comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. He appeared on his mother’s television series Kate McShane at nine and made Super 8 movies with his sister and friends, early signs that acting and filmmaking would remain closely linked for him. Inspired by Second City Television, Stiller gravitated toward sketch comedy. His short-film parodies helped lead to a writing and featured-performer stint on Saturday Night Live, followed by two versions of The Ben Stiller Show. The Fox series was short-lived, but its sharp mix of film, television and celebrity satire won an Emmy for writing after cancellation. That instinct for parody became central to Stiller’s screen identity. He directed and co-starred in Reality Bites, directed The Cable Guy and later turned the fashion-world character Derek Zoolander into a feature. As an actor, he found one of his defining roles opposite Robert De Niro as the anxious Greg Focker in Meet the Parents. There’s Something About Mary, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, The Royal Tenenbaums and the Night at the Museum films further showed how well he could play confidence, panic, vanity or exasperation—sometimes within the same performance. Stiller has also repeatedly taken creative control behind the camera. He directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in Tropic Thunder, then produced, directed and starred in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. His directing later extended to television with Escape at Dannemora and Severance, where he has served as an executive producer and directed multiple episodes. Alongside dramatic work such as Greenberg and voice acting in the Madagascar films, those projects make his career difficult to reduce to a single comic persona. He is not simply a comedy star who sometimes directs; filmmaking has been part of the project from the beginning.