I didn’t think I could be as excited by a directorial Ben Stiller project as I am about his dystopic Apple TV+ series “Severance,” but life is full of surprises. The Jewish director is making a documentary about his famous parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and his recent comments about what the film will uncover has me super pumped.
In talk show appearances to promote the second season of “Severance,” Stiller has spoken about how the project came about in 2020, after his dad died. His mother passed away years earlier, in 2015. The documentary was at first meant to focus on his parents and their illustrious careers, but soon, it “turned into a story about being in a family that’s in show business,” he said on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which is filmed in the same theater where his parents performed 36 times on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” appearances that helped make them household names.
Ben and his sister, Amy, who both followed in their parents’ footsteps and became entertainers, grew up entrenched in the show biz world, the same world that Ben’s kids are now interested in entering (this summer, his daughter Ella, a Juilliard drama school alum, participated in the readings of two Jewish plays, “The Last Yiddish Speaker” and “Yom Kippur Abortion”). Stiller also wanted to explore how his parents’ creativity crossed into their relationship — the two didn’t envision being a comedy duo at first, yet they worked together for over 60 years. In an interview on “The View,” Stiller, who separated briefly from his wife, Christine Taylor, before reuniting in 2022, opened up about their reconciliation during the pandemic, saying that his parents’ marriage helped shape the way he thinks about his own. “They got through the ups and downs. And, you know, they kind of grew together. And it was not always great. There was a lot of tension, having to work together.”
That tension eventually made the iconic duo part professional ways for a while.
Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller met in Chicago when they were part of the Compass Players, the first improvisational theater group in the U.S., founded by David Shepherd and Paul Sills (Alan Alda, Linda Lavin, Elaine May and Ed Asner are some other famous former members). Their banter and bickering act became a late-night TV sensation and a hit in commercials. One of their sketches was about a Catholic-Jewish wedding, featuring a couple struggling to get through the verbiage of the two different religions. Meara, indeed, was Catholic, and Stiller was Jewish. She converted to Judaism a few years into their marriage, before the birth of their daughter, Amy. Meara took Judaism seriously, and Stiller joked that “being married to Anne has made me more Jewish.” By the 1980s and ’90s, Stiller and Meara had separate careers. She starred in “All In the Family,” he in “Seinfeld.” They later reunited in the show “King of Queens.”
Last year, Ben talked about his parents’ relationship to Judaism and the Yiddish words that peppered his life in an interview with Mayim Bialik: “My dad was pretty spiritual and definitely connected to his Judaism; my mom knew more about religion since she had to learn about it [when she converted] and was committed to it all,” he said. He wrote in an op-ed for Time last year about how his Jewish upbringing and family history shaped the way he views the Hamas-Israel War.
After chatting with Colbert, he shared a prophetic interview with Anne and Jerry for “The Pat Collins Show,” in which an interviewer introduced a young Benjamin Stiller as an aspiring, uncompromising TV producer. His mother said she hoped that he would be wildly successful — and hire his parents. When the interviewers suggested that to little Benjamin, who seems to be 10 or even younger, he replies with an emphatic “no!”
“It’d be hard to work with you,” he tells his parents.
“How quickly they forget,” Meara laments.
Of course, despite his protests as a little boy, the actor, writer and director went on to cast his parents in many of his projects, from “Reality Bites” to the “Zoolander” movies. His sister, Amy, also can be seen in quite a few of his directorial ventures. He also brought his parents with him to late night TV appearances on “The Conan O’Brien Show.”
Stiller never stopped finding ways to share his parents’ brilliance with the world. At a time when the term “nepo baby” sometimes makes stars want to shy away from their famous parents, he loved to show off the two creators who helped raise him. It’s so lovely to know that he isn’t quite done doing that yet. I can’t wait to see this documentary, and hope its full of more lovely archival footage from the family, and maybe even a glimpse into Ben’s not-so-glamorous bar mitzvah (which was held in a synagogue basement).
