Ben Stiller fails better
Ben Stiller usually has a good read on what audiences are interested in. But in a new interview with David Duchovny's Fail Better podcast — in which The X-files star explores how failure shapes a person — the actor says he was “blindsided” that Zoolander 2 was a box-office flop.
“I thought everybody wanted this,” Stiller, 58, said of the misfire (via People). “And then it's like, `Wow, I must have really f---ed this up. Everybody didn't go to it. And it's got these horrible reviews.' It really freaked me out because I was like, `I didn't know (it) was that bad?'”
The star-studded sequel's failure “affected” him for a long period afterward.
“What scared me the most on that one was I'm losing what I think what's funny, the questioning yourself,” he admitted. “It was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time.”
It turned into a blessing for Stiller as he moved into directing small screen projects, including Showtime's Escape From Dannemora and the acclaimed Apple TV+ drama Severance. He also served as a producer on the Apple TV+ series High Desert with Patricia Arquette and Matt Dillon.
“The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said `Make Zoolander 3 right now,' or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that. But I had this space to kind of sit with myself and have to deal with it and other projects that I had been working on — not comedies, some of them — I have the time to actually just work on and develop. Even if somebody said, `Well, why don't you go do another comedy or do this?' I probably could have figured out something to do. But I just didn't want to.”
He continued: “Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do. I always loved directing. I always loved making movies. I always, in my mind, loved the idea of just directing movies that since I was a kid, and not necessarily comedies. And so, over the course of like the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series.”
In 2022, Stiller told Esquire that watching the film fail so spectacularly was “not a great experience.”
“(If Zoolander 2 had been a huge hit) I might have got distracted by other bright shiny objects, but instead it opened a path where I could just do what I'd honestly wanted to do for years and years, which was: just direct something!”
When he was promoting the sequel, Stiller told the Today show that he was surprised he got a chance to make a followup. “When the first one came out, no one really went to see it,” he said — something that played out once again after Zoolander 2 opened to empty movie theatres.