Ben Stiller admitted cutting his daughter from his movie was the “worst decision” he ever made as a parent.
The “Zoolander” star reveals in a new documentary about his parents Jerry Stiller and Ann Mehra, “Stiller & Mehra: Nothing Lost,” that he still struggles with the omission of his now 23-year-old daughter Ella Olivia Stiller from the 2013 film “The Secret of Walter Mitty.”
“This was probably the worst decision of my life,” Ben told Ella, reflecting on how he inherited his father’s obsession with perfection, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Ben’s daughter with wife Christine Taylor was able to laugh off the cut, saying she was “really scared” to make her on-camera film debut as young Odessa Mitty, the brother of frontman Walter Mitty, played by Ben, 59.
The actress admitted that her brief scene “made no sense in the movie.”
“For me, this movie is about something much deeper,” agreed Ben, who also directed the film. “This film is about my own obsession with work, or perfectionism.”
The “Tropic Thunder” star then asked her 20-year-old son, Quinlin Dempsey Stiller, if he could relate to what Ella was going through.
“You have a lot of hats and you’re trying to balance them out, right?” Quinlin explained. “Not only is he a director, an actor, a producer, a writer, but he’s also a father figure, right? And sometimes I felt like that might carry over into other things.”
“I think after you’ve had a hard day or something goes wrong, you have a lot of things to think about in your head,” he added elsewhere.
“And once you get into a place like that…I think it’s hard to get out of there. So it kind of puts a damper on the fun part of being on vacation,” Quinlin said.
Ben claimed that growing up watching his famous parents work together as comedians “all the stress and tension” had an impact on who he is as a person.
Sharing how he once vowed to never be like them, he said, “Ironically, I thought I was doing much better than my parents. I thought I was making it.”
“I would fly home on the weekends and set up a special place for the kids who came on set to play. But really, just hearing them talk about it for their kids, it was the same thing I was going through as a kid. I didn’t really understand it at the time.”
In an interview with The Times published on Saturday, the director made further admissions. “But back then, I probably failed my kids more than my parents did us.”
Jerry, who passed away in 2020, and Mehra, who passed away in 2015, married in 1954 and have a daughter, Amy, who is now 64 years old.
Meanwhile, Ben and Taylor, 54, married in 2000 and have been together ever since, although they separated for about four years in 2017.
