Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, and Broadway performer born on November 30, 1965, in New York City, where he was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He is the son of comedians and actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. His father came from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, while his mother converted to Reform Judaism after their marriage. Stiller has an older sister, Amy, who appeared in several of his productions.

Stiller showed an early interest in performance and filmmaking, making Super 8 movies with his sister and friends as a child. At age 9, he made his acting debut as a guest on his mother's television series Kate McShane. In the late 1970s, he performed with NYC's First All Children's Theater, taking on multiple roles including the title role in Clever Jack and the Magic Beanstalk. During his high school years, he also played drums in the post-punk band Capital Punishment, which released the album Roadkill in 1982 and reunited in 2018 to release an EP titled This is Capital Punishment for Record Store Day. He graduated from the Calhoun School in New York in 1983 and later enrolled as a film student at the University of California, Los Angeles, leaving after nine months to return to New York City.

His Broadway career spans from 1986 to 2011 and includes a role in the 1986 revival of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, a production that earned four Tony Awards and featured actor John Mahoney. During the run of that production, Stiller created a satirical mockumentary centered on Mahoney, which was well received by the cast and crew. He followed it with a short film called The Hustler of Money, a parody of Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money, in which he played a send-up of Tom Cruise's character while Mahoney took on the Paul Newman role as a bowling hustler. That short film aired on Saturday Night Live in 1987 and led to Stiller being offered a writing position on the show. He joined Saturday Night Live in 1989 as both a writer and featured performer, departing after four episodes when the show declined to let him continue making short films.

Stiller's television career took a significant turn when MTV producers, impressed with his short film Going Back to Brooklyn, offered him a 13-episode series in 1990. The Ben Stiller Show mixed comedy sketches with music videos and featured his parents and sister in occasional appearances. A subsequent version of the show aired on Fox in 1992 and 1993, with writers including Stiller and Judd Apatow and an ensemble cast featuring Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, and Bob Odenkirk. Though the Fox series ranked poorly in the ratings, it earned a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Program.

His film career began with a small role on the television soap opera Guiding Light and a bit part in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun before he transitioned into directing. He made his directorial debut with Reality Bites in 1994 and went on to direct and star in The Cable Guy in 1996 and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 2013. As an actor, he appeared in a wide range of studio comedies, among them There's Something About Mary (1998), Zoolander (2001), the Meet the Parents franchise beginning in 2000, the Madagascar franchise from 2005 to 2012, the Night at the Museum films from 2006 to 2014, Along Came Polly (2004), Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), Starsky and Hutch (2004), Tower Heist (2011), and Tropic Thunder (2008). His work in independent films includes Flirting with Disaster (1996), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Greenberg (2010), While We're Young (2014), and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). His domestic box office output has exceeded $2.6 billion in the United States and Canada, averaging $79 million per film.

Since the mid-2010s, Stiller has concentrated primarily on directing and producing for television. In 2018 he directed the Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, which earned him a Directors Guild of America Award and two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Limited Series and Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. Beginning in 2022, he has directed and executive produced the Apple TV+ series Severance, receiving four additional Primetime Emmy Award nominations for that work. His honors across his career include an Emmy Award, a Directors Guild of America Award, a Britannia Award, and a Teen Choice Award.