Ben Stiller is looking back on his extraordinarily short tenure on Saturday Night Live.
As host David Marchese noted on the most recent episode of the New York Times podcast The InterviewStiller famously only appeared in four episodes of the long-running NBC sketch comedy show in 1989, leaving his job as a writer and featured performer after only five weeks. Marchese asked the Severance director how SNL creator Lorne Michaels reacted to his decision to leave.
“He was like, ‘Okay,’ ” Stiller recalled, imitating Michaels’ voice. “ ‘Ben’s gonna do what Ben’s gonna do.’ ”
“It wasn’t great, but I knew that I couldn’t do well there because I wasn’t great at live performing,” Stiller added. “I got too nervous. I didn’t enjoy it, and I wanted to be making short films. So, like, in the moment, there were reasons why, and I had this opportunity to do this MTV show.”
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Stiller said that it had been one of his dreams to be on SNLand looking back, he wasn’t sure how he had the — in Marchese’s words — “gumption” to walk away. “But for whatever reason, I followed that instinct,” he said.
As Stiller noted, he followed up his stint on SNL with his own sketch comedy series, The Ben Stiller Showwhich aired six episodes on MTV in 1990, with another 12 airing on Fox in 1992.
Stiller, of course, went on to star in a string of some of the biggest Hollywood comedies of the late ’90s and early 2000s, including There’s Something About Mary (1998), Meet the Parents (2000) and Zoolander (2001).
“I would open up a newspaper and [read] ‘Why is Ben Stiller in every movie?’ ” the actor said of that period in his career. “I was just like, ‘I don’t know,’ you know? ‘I’m here. I love doing what I do.’ æ
Stiller added that it’s only in retrospect that he can look back and say “ ‘Wow, there was, like, a thing happening there that, you know, I was fortunate to be a part of.’ But I don’t know what the zeitgeist was.”
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“You can look at 2000s comedies now, and go, ‘Okay, they were a specific kind of thing, a tone,’ ” he continued. “And there were a lot of great things in those comedies too that we don’t have now, but I don’t know if you can recreate that now. But at the time, I really wasn’t analyzing it too much. I was kinda just trying to figure out how to navigate it.”
In a follow-up call with Marchese, Stiller expanded on how he feels making comedy has changed since the early 2000s.
“It’s really hard to make a comedy, you know?” he explained. “I think it’s just the freedom, you know, the freedom to, like, not worry about how something was gonna get interpreted. And I do think it was sort of — in a weird way, it was a freer time because there was less analysis given even to the people who were making the comedy. I think it was just, like, kind of a — I don’t wanna say a more innocent time 20 years ago, because it wasn’t that innocent, but weirdly, kind of, it was. You know?”
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Stiller said that his “outlook” changed after the underperformance of 2016’s Zoolander 2. In the years since, he’s shifted toward directing darker, more serious projects like 2018’s Escape at Dannemora and Severance. But, he said, he still gets offers to do the kind of big comedies he made in the early 2000s — including pitches for a potential fourth installment in the Meet the Parents series.
Last month, PEOPLE confirmed that Stiller, Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner and Teri Polo were all in talks to return for another Fockers film, and in his conversation with Marchese, Stiller hinted at what the sequel could look like.
“It came out a couple years ago, I think, that I was, like, the same age as De Niro was when we did the first movie, and kinda like, what would have evolved in that, you know? Now that my character, that Greg would have kids, maybe one of them is getting married. So, it kind of, you know, was an interesting sort of mirror to the first movie,” he said. “If there was something that came together on Fockers that everybody liked that was fun, you know, I’m open to that. But I think maybe for me as a director, my head is in a different place.”
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