We can all get sick of our favorite actors, especially when they’re victims of overexposure. Ben Still had been on the scene since the 1980s but really came into his own in the 1990s (shoutouts to The Ben Stiller Show and Heavyweights!). After the success of There’s Something About Mary in 1998, the 2000s didn’t have a single year without multiple Ben Stiller movies. There was Meet the Parents and Zoolander and Duplex and Dodgeball and on and on. And after a while, it just got old for some. Maybe he could dodge a wrench, but Stiller couldn’t dodge the backlash.

Appearing on The New York Times’ The Interview podcast (via IndieWire), Ben Stiller remembered “opening up the L.A. Times and there was this writer who wrote a letter: ‘Dear God, stop putting Ben Stiller in comedies,’ I was just like, I don’t know, I’m here, I love doing what I do. But it’s only in retrospect that I can go, ‘Wow, there was a thing happening that I was fortunate to be a part of.’ But I don’t know what the zeitgeist was.”

That’s some genuine positivity for a guy who was out in a situation where he could have easily had the audience turn their back on him, something we’ve seen happen even with his collaborators (as much as we like the dudes, the Frat Pack’s box office success is long behind him). On what worked in that era, Ben Stiller added, “You can look at 2000s comedies, and they were a specific kind of thing, a tone, and there were a lot of great things in those comedies that we don’t have now. I don’t know if you could recreate that.” While he’s not specifically name-dropping Tropic Thunder, we all know that’s in that discussion.

On the verge of 60, Ben Stiller now cares less about what some nameless entertainment reporter wrote of him all those years ago. “I’m at this point in my life, do I really want to take this chance right now? How much do I care about what the ‘bad’ result is? You care a little less about that…The day after something doesn’t do well or if it gets bad reviews, it’s not like anything in your life has changed. It’s just how you feel. You feel embarrassed or you feel like, ‘Damn, I wanted to be the winner.’ But winning doesn’t always happen. It usually doesn’t happen. So how do you live with that?”

Nowadays, Ben Stiller is earning some of the highest praise of his career by directing the bulk of the episodes for Apple TV+’s Severance, which is currently in its stellar second season.

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