Ben Stiller is working to break the Nepo baby mold after his children accused him of being fatherless.
Ben, the son of Hollywood icons Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, reflected on how his childhood influenced his parenting while discussing his new documentary, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Lost,” on “The View” Thursday.
The Meet the Parents actor, who has daughter Ella, 23, and son Quinlin, 20, with wife Christine Taylor, explained a pattern he noticed while making a film about his late parents.
“We have kids who are now actors, and having that experience became part of the film in terms of talking to kids about how these things are passed down cyclically and through generations,” Ben said.
“You want to do better than your parents,” he continued. “Sometimes it works out better in some places, and sometimes it goes worse in some places. It’s a struggle that we all go through.”
Ben, 59, also appeared on “Today” on Thursday and praised his co-host Savannah Guthrie for having “tough” conversations with his kids on camera.
“I realized that the influence my parents had on me and my sister, and the influence all parents had on their children, had an impact on my relationship with my wife and my children,” Ben explained.
“As I looked deeper into my parents’ relationship, I realized I had to acknowledge my own relationship and the influence they had on it. So it became more of a family story,” he said of the project.
While interviewing his wife and children for the doc, Ben finds himself having new and vulnerable conversations with them.
“As I watched the cut, I thought, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve never talked about something this personal before,'” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Thursday.
In the documentary, the “Zoolander” star’s children blamed not being around them as much while they were growing up.
Ella told her father: “I literally have no recollection of you being around when I was a child.”
When Ben asked her son if Ella’s ideas resonated with him, Quinlin replied that parenting seemed to be “last” on his list of priorities.
“After a hard day, or when something goes wrong, you can find yourself in a mess, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to get out of it,” Quinlin said. “That might take some of the fun out of the vacation.
“You have a lot of hats and you’re trying to find a balance, right?” he continued. “He’s a director, he’s an actor, he’s a producer, he’s a writer. But he’s also just a father.”
Quinlin also expressed disappointment that her father was away from home for months due to filming schedules.
Ben admitted that he thought he did a better job than his father, but now he knows that is not true.
“I thought I was done,” Ben said in the documentary. “I would fly home on the weekends and look for a special place for the kids to play when they were visiting the set. But really, just hearing their stories, to them it was the same thing I was experiencing as a kid, and I had no idea.”
In an interview with The Times published earlier this month, Ben admitted he had “failed” raising children.
