MEET THE PARENTS

Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor’s Split ‘Loaded’ With Parental Baggage

The couple split in 2017 after rekindling their romance during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Ben Stiller is opening up about his 2017 separation from Christine Taylor. He compared their 18-year marriage to the 61-year marriage of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, which ended with Meara’s 2015 death. “When we separated, my feeling was like ‘Oh, I’m failing at this’ and look at my parents they have this incredible 50-plus-year marriage and I can’t live up to that,” Stiller said in his new documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost. As Stiller puts it, both couples worked together at the beginning of their relationships, which made him worry about becoming his parents—something he didn’t want to do. He also wondered what “toll” working together closely while touring a comedy act put on his parents’ relationship. Taylor, who rekindled her romance with Stiller during the COVID-19 lockdown, said she felt “history” from his parents’ marriage impacted their own, as he was concerned about the “extra strain” that constantly spending time together could impose. “I also felt like there was a fear from you for me of what that would look like to the outside world,” she said. “I mean it was very loaded.”