Ben Stiller’s new documentary about his parents’ marriage, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, led him to reflect on his period of separation from his own wife, Christine Taylor, from 2017 through 2022. In the film, which debuted at the New York Film Festival on October 6, Taylor and Stiller have a conversation about their breakup after 17 years of marriage, per People. Stiller says the ghost of his parents’ relationship, during which they were not only married but worked together, haunted his relationship with fellow actor Taylor, who appeared in Stiller’s movies including Dodgeball and Zoolander after breaking out in the Brady Bunch films as Marcia Brady in the ’90s. Despite the strength of his parents’ marriage, which he documents in the film, Stiller was scared of become too intertwined with his partner, as his parents did. “I don’t want to become my parents,” Stiller thought when their relationship began.

“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 says to Stiller in the documentary, 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.”

The couple broke up in 2017 then got back together during the pandemic. Stiller remembers that, during the separation, his “feeling was like, Oh, I’m failing at this,” whereas his parents had “this incredible 50-plus-year marriage, and I can’t live up to that.” Eventually, Stiller and Taylor rekindled after living together during lockdown — while Stiller began work on this documentary. “So there was sort of this coming together,” he says in the film. “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.” Thank goodness Taylor didn’t have to date George Glass or some other fake.

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 The actors discuss their five years apart in Stiller’s film about his parents, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.