When the Emmy-award winning series “Severance” (Apple TV+) makes its return on Jan. 17, it will resume the story of, and maybe provide some answers to, the mysterious doings of Lumon Industries. In case you haven’t seen the show or are in need of a refresher — it has been three long years since the first season aired — Lumon is the creepily enigmatic corporation staffed by office drones, including the protagonist Mark (played by Adam Scott), who have willingly chosen to have their consciousnesses artificially split in two. That is, the employees’ work selves (known as innies) and their off-hours selves (their outies) have been literally psychologically disconnected — to disorientating and disturbing effect.
Trying to make sense of a divided self is an idea to which Ben Stiller, who directs and is an executive producer of “Severance,” can probably relate. He became a superstar with his performances in mainstream Hollywood hits like the “Meet the Parents” and “Night at the Museum” franchises. But his most interesting acting work has been in more complicated, tonally varied independent films like “Greenberg,” directed by Noah Baumbach, and “Brad’s Status,” directed by Mike White. As a director himself — directing was always his ambition, not acting — Stiller, 59, has a far more subversive and distinctive touch than the broad comedies that made him famous. See, as evidence, his darkly funny satires “The Cable Guy” and “Tropic Thunder” (which he also starred in), as well as more serious efforts like the 2018 Showtime crime series “Escape at Dannemora.”
So I don’t think I’m overreaching in suggesting that there has always been some innie-outie “Severance”-style tension running through Stiller’s own story. It’s a tension, as I learned while speaking with him at his Manhattan office, that he has been trying to make sense of too.
Were there specific things that working on comedy gave you the tools for when it came to making “Severance,” which I would describe as maybe comedy-adjacent? I feel like the show has its basis in the workplace comedy, like “The Office” or “Office Space” or “Parks and Recreation.” This season we probably went to some stranger places, but that was also part of what the show is. The show has to continue on its journey and can’t just stay doing the same thing.
You think the second season is still in the vein of a workplace comedy? Yeah, it is based on the idea that started the show: These people are in a workplace doing a job that they don’t understand; they don’t know who they are or why they’re there. That to me has always been the blueprint.
Do you know how the series ends? We have the end, yes.
Would it be a spoiler to tell me? Of course!
But you know what you’re working toward? Yes, we definitely have an end. I think we now know exactly how many seasons, which I won’t say.
Can you say something enigmatic that seems as if it reveals a clue to the ending? [Laughs.] I mean, in my mind, the series has always been about Mark and his innie and his outie, and the ultimate destination for both of them.
So the idea of people being at work and they don’t feel in control, don’t know who’s really making the decisions — I was thinking that Hollywood is like that. Did your own work experience inform the show? I think what you said is true, that at a certain point there’s always somebody making a decision who is not making it to your face or you don’t even know who that person is. Why a decision is made is never explained to the creative person. Or, if it is, it’s usually not the truth. It’s a cliché in Hollywood, but it’s kind of true that everybody will say yes and it doesn’t mean yes. It means no or let me think about it — more than ever, honestly. It’s a very tough environment now to get things made. The strike, post-Covid — it’s more expensive to make things, and I think the decision makers are trying to keep their jobs and trying to figure out how to make things work for them, which means constriction and choices that are safer.
In the late ’90s into the 2000s, your bread-and-butter was big Hollywood comedies, and in a lot of those films you played a type: a well-meaning outsider who is made to suffer indignities but ultimately comes out on top. Did you understand why audiences responded to you in that role? No. I remember 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. 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.
But you did have this real string of big movies from “There’s Something About Mary” through the “Night at the Museum” sequels. Did you feel as if, because those movies were hitting, you got swept up in something that was out of your control? It’s not something that when you’re in it, you are really able to analyze.
I sort of don’t believe you when you say that. Really?
I suspect you were very strategic throughout your career, thinking about what was going to work at different times. I don’t think so, because I don’t think I’m that smart. I would make decisions. I remember very clearly: “Night at the Museum” was a decision because I grew up near the natural-history museum, and I thought, If I was a kid, I’d love this and it would be fun to do.
But the “Night at the Museum 3” decision? Right. [Laughs.]
It’s a little different, right? Yeah. But also at that point you’ve got a team together, and those were all fun to do, and I’m not going to not want to work with Robin Williams or Shawn Levy. But when I was in that period, I don’t think I had the ability to hover over it. A lot of actors and filmmakers do have that ability. The only part of it that was nagging at me is I liked to do other kinds of movies as a filmmaker and I never really stopped to make the time to do that.
Do you remember experiences where you might have been thinking, I want to make this, but then you got the offer to do “Along Came Polly” or whatever? Yeah, sure, and that’s a personal choice you make at the time. Fear is always a big thing. I saw a Q&A with Jeremy Strong for that movie “The Apprentice,” and somebody asked him, Why did you want to do this role? He said, “Fear.” I totally identify with that.
What was a fear-driven decision that you made? Oh, I think so many decisions are based in it. It’s whether or not the fear is going to push you away from something or you’re going to jump off the cliff with it. I had a chance to do “Glengarry Glen Ross” on Broadway probably around that “Along Came Polly” time. I decided not to. Maybe I would have liked to have done that. But it’s where I was at the time.
Has what you’re afraid of changed? I think as you get older it changes everything. 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 quote unquote 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? And when you take the chance, it’s still important that you took the leap and you went for it. Failures can be in not taking the chance. As you get older that’s something that you start to feel. It’s like, I just want to have this experience while I’m still here.
I did one of these interviews with Eddie Murphy, and he said he wants to do only projects that he knows will work. Which doesn’t quite sound like how you think about it. Sometimes the audience has to have time. I feel like this has happened in a bunch of movies I’ve done. It takes the audience a few years to get it, like “Zoolander.” When “Zoolander” came out, it was not a big hit, because what a weird world, what a weird character, but once they became acclimated to it, then it became something that they really liked.
So “Reality Bites” was the first film you directed, and it seemed to speak to Gen-X and still continues to. Is that film representative of any specific generational values that you hold? I feel like the film is a timepiece of where we were at that moment, put through a pop-culture lens. It was written by Helen Childress, who was taking her experience and trying to encapsulate the issues that she was dealing with. I was coming at it more as my character, Michael, who was trying to commodify it a little bit and outside of it a little bit. Helen was Lelaina [the idealistic character played by Winona Ryder in the film] and I was Michael. I do feel like, generationally though, the issues in that movie are evergreen.
Oh, I disagree. Really?
Yeah. Why do you think they’re evergreen? I just think it’s that moment in time where, if you have parents who supported you or whatever, you’re having to cut the cord and go out into the world and find yourself.
I agree with that aspect. The aspect of the film that to me feels representative of a Gen-X attitude that has basically disappeared is the anxiety about selling out. But I think a lot of that is because of how social media has changed how people can upload their lives to everyone directly.
What’s the connection? I don’t follow. Just that Lelaina was making a little documentary on her video camera that then she had to give to Michael to put on the MTV-version of what that was, and now you just go straight to the internet. I think young people are expected to do that now. To create their own movie and get it out into the world. It plays into what you’re saying, which is it’s almost like if you’re not selling out, you’re not doing what you should be doing. I feel that with my kids. I see that pressure on them when I see their friends and what they post and their image of what they put out into the world. It’s a responsibility: If you don’t do that, you’re not a part of what’s going on.
I know that a project you had wanted to make for a long time was an adaptation of “What Makes Sammy Run?” the Budd Schulberg novel. It’s a story about a Jewish character named Sammy Glick who’s a conniving, amoral striver in Hollywood and his unquenchable thirst to succeed. That’s an interesting movie for a young, successful Jewish man in Hollywood to want to make. What was it about that book that resonated with you? I think Budd Schulberg saw it as a metaphor for anybody who wants to get to the top — that mind-set of, do whatever it takes. That’s why I think the novel resonates. There’s always been a resistance to it, and I can understand why. For a long time I was frustrated because I felt like this story should be made, but the flip side of it is it can be looked at as you’re shining a spotlight on a Jewish character who is the self-hating Jew who is willing to do whatever.
And that was the resistance to making it? Partly, I think so. It’s always been hard to make show-business stories in Hollywood because people in the business feel like the outside world isn’t interested in the inside baseball of it. It’s funny, I think about it now and I would love to see that story made. What I worry about is how people would interpret it on the outside — and that’s as a Jewish person.
Are ways in which, after Oct. 7, being Jewish in Hollywood has been trickier to navigate? Have things felt different? I think just being a Jewish person feels different. I grew up in an incredibly sheltered Upper West Side environment. I never experienced antisemitism. So to start feeling that now, where other people have felt it their whole lives, and to see the rise in antisemitic violence, is something that I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime. The reality of it is frightening.
Has any of that reality filtered into your working life? I mean, in terms of the business, there’s always been those misconceptions of how Jews are involved in Hollywood. A lot of that is a result of the fact that there were a lot of successful Jewish people who started the Hollywood movie industry, so it sort of folded in on itself. But the reality of that world now is so different. The Jewish population is so small. It took me a long time to even realize, in my sheltered world that, what is it, 20 million Jews in the whole world? [The actual total is just under 16 million.] The proportion of success, it’s a tough thing to navigate. I feel like right now there’s so much hate and antipathy out there, and it’s not limited to antisemitism. That’s something Jewish people are feeling but people are feeling it all over, too.
I have no smooth segue to get out of the antisemitism portion of this conversation. [Laughs.] Let’s take a hard left.
In my reading of your career, around 2010, a real change happens. You started doing fewer of the big, broad comedies and instead made films like “Greenberg,” “While We’re Young” and “The Meyerowitz Stories.” You did “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “Brad’s Status.” These are all about middle-aged guys working through the big questions. Was doing those a result of a conscious decision to start doing a different kind of film? Yeah. Around that time I moved back to New York. I’d been living in L.A. for 20 years, and I wanted to try to spend more time at home and try to work closer to home. But for me, really where it changed in terms of my outlook was after “Zoolander 2.” It was the feeling of like, everybody wants this and I’m going to do it, and I had fun doing it, and then nobody wanted it! I was like, But you said you wanted it! And, really, was it that bad? That was where I was like, I have to make a choice. I want to do these other things and not go off if somebody’s offering “Zoolander 3.” But “Zoolander 2” gave me the gift of nobody offering me “Zoolander 3.” [Laughs.] Also, my marriage wasn’t in a great place. There was a lot going on.
You mentioned that your marriage was in a bad place. You and your wife, Christine Taylor, separated for a while and then reconciled. I saw her on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, and she brought up the idea of the separation and reconciliation being a result of what she called adult “growth spurts.” What was your growth spurt during that time? When we separated, it was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship, how much I loved our family unit. It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected. In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together. I don’t know where Christine was, you’d have to ask her, but Covid put us all together in the same house.
An act of God. Yeah. It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together. But I’m so grateful for it, and I think not that many people do come back together when they separate. There’s nothing like that, when you come back. You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.
My understanding is that you’re working on a documentary about your parents, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, the comedy team. If people don’t know the team, they certainly know that your father played George Costanza’s dad on “Seinfeld.” Yeah.
What has working on the documentary revealed to you about your understanding of your parents? I’m realizing it’s all kind of reflecting back on my own issues that I have with them. I feel so fortunate that I have all this footage of my parents and our family from these Super-8 movies that my dad took and then I took, and recordings my dad made. Just hours and hours, talking with my mother as they were writing sketches or coming up with ideas. Or sometimes he’d record us just because he wanted to have our voices. I was thinking about it this morning: how much I love my father but also that tension of not wanting to be my father, but everybody loves my father. And as a son, I would love to be loved as my father was because he was a lovely person. But then there’s also the thing of, But I’m me.
The conflict was between not wanting to be your father but also wanting people’s affection the way he had? I think it was more just wanting to individuate from my father, wanting to be my own person, not being into their comedy. I wanted to be a serious director. Then when I discovered comedy, it wasn’t what they did. It was “Saturday Night Live.” Not until I was older was I able to really appreciate what they did. But all the while, my parents were so supportive, especially my dad. My mom was a bit of a tougher audience. My dad was very overprotective and concerned about the rejection in show business that you have to deal with. It’s a hard thing when you look up to a parent so much in terms of what their essence is. Jerry’s essence was so sweet. I look at myself and go, Am I as good as he was?
Are you? I don’t know. I try. He obviously wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t one of those guys who was like, win, win, win. His drive was just to create and try to protect his family and to be loved.
You’re sitting on a couch, so this is all appropriate. I’m gonna lie down now.
That was your dad. Your mom was a tougher critic? She was. She was Irish Catholic, very funny. I think I share more of my mom’s sense of humor than my dad’s. She was a serious actor who then my dad drew into comedy, who came up with the idea for them to do their comedy act to make money after they’d been married for five or six years in the ’50s. I think she never loved comedy. I think she was more naturally adept at it than my dad, actually. My dad was funny, but his dream was to be Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny. My mother was more of a polished stage performer, like in nightclubs. She knew how to work a crowd, and she wrote plays, and she was more interested in writing and reading and acting in different kinds of things. She saw me doing comedy, and she’s like, “That’s great, but I liked ‘Greenberg’” or “I liked ‘Permanent Midnight.’”
There’s a New Yorker profile of you from 2012. The writer mentioned that you had been developing a project called “The Mirror.” It was about a Hollywood success who was worried he was a sellout. The profile’s writer made hay of this as a parallel for you, but the tidbit in there that I was interested in was that your mother vetoed the project? What was that about? The idea of the movie was my family had to play my family, and also there was a psychiatrist who kicks off the whole thing. I wanted Gene Wilder to play that guy, and I sent it to my mom and to Gene Wilder, and they both nixed it. Gene Wilder was like, I think you’re great, but I do not like this project. [Laughs.] I thought it was really good. My mother didn’t want to go there. That was very atypical of her. Because when I was starting out, with audition tapes or I did an audition reel for “Saturday Night Live,” I had my parents in them. But for some reason, that specific role — I don’t know. I wish I could ask her.
You mentioned “Saturday Night Live.” You were infamously on the show in 1989 for only four episodes or something. What is the conversation like when you go into Lorne Michaels’s office and tell him, I’m leaving the show that every young comedian in the country aspires to be on? He was like, [in a very good Lorne Michaels impression] “OK. Ben’s going to do what Ben’s going to do.” It wasn’t great, but I knew that I couldn’t do well there because I wasn’t great at live performing. My mom would have been better on that show. I got too nervous, I didn’t enjoy it, and I wanted to be making short films. So in the moment, there were reasons, and I had this opportunity to do this MTV show [“The Ben Stiller Show”]. It had been my dream to be on “Saturday Night Live,” but looking back on it, I don’t remember exactly how I had the gumption, but for whatever reason, I followed that instinct.
Sorry to jump around, but I read your dad’s memoir, “Married to Laughter.” There was a segment in there that I wanted to read to you: “What words of wisdom can I give my children? See past the hype and the glitz and ask yourself why you want to perform. It may take years to arrive at the answers, but understanding the reasons will help you to keep the dream alive and reach your goals.” Do you understand your reasons for why you do what you do? It’s a good question. I think so. I think it’s about trying to get closer to expressing my true self, trying to somehow make something that feels real and maybe opening up myself in a way that’s closer to the bone. It’s figuring out just what life is about. I haven’t figured that out yet, and I feel like that’s what I want to try to make the work that I do about.
I probably should have brought this up when it was more thematically appropriate, but I love a movie you made in the mid-90s called “Heavyweights,” which is about a lunatic named Tony Perkis who buys, for a lack of a better term, a fat camp and essentially tries to torture kids into losing weight. This is a Disney movie by the way. They’re not making that today.
Then about 10 years later in “Dodgeball,” you did a character named White Goodman, who’s also the bad guy, who’s trying to professionalize a dodge-ball league. It’s essentially the same character transposed from one film into the other, right? Shh, David. No, they’re not. They’re totally different. One has blond hair and one has dark hair. One has a mustache. [Laughs.] No, I mean, those are two of the most fun experiences I ever had on movies. We did the reading for “Dodgeball,” Rawson Thurber had written the movie and was directing and I was like, I don’t know what voice I need to do. I kind of just went into that voice, and [Thurber] was like, That’s great. I was like, I kind of did that in “Heavyweights.” He was like, Ah, it’s all right. I never thought I was trying to pull one over. I never thought anybody 30 years later —
Here I am! In The New York Times, calling out “Heavyweights” and “Dodgeball”! If I could go back. …
I’m determined to elicit a nugget of “Severance” information that’ll make the obsessives on the internet go nutty. So, without giving too much away, there’s an episode in the upcoming season where someone, and it’s not clear who, is walking and whistling a melody, which, I believe, is the melody of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Is that correct? I mean, I don’t think that’s a spoiler to say that.
But do you deny that that song’s lyrics are perhaps a Rosetta Stone for deciphering exactly what “Severance” and Lumon are up to? I’m not going to say anything.
I knew it! I want to leave all options open. But, no, I’m just a Gordon Lightfoot fan. I used “Carefree Highway” in “Escape at Dannemora.” I will hopefully always be able to use his music because I think he’s one of the great artists of our time.
Let me try to wrap things up with a bit of a bow. Your ambition early on was to try to make movies as good as Albert Brooks’s. Have you lived up to that? God, no. He wrote them with Monica [Johnson] but he basically created it all on his own. He had a persona that he developed. I guess you could say Woody Allen did it, too. But there was something about the tone of his humor that is so unique. So for me the answer is no. I really just want to keep getting closer to making something that I feel is as good and as honest as it can be in terms of who I am. That’s something that I feel like I’m still working toward and, hopefully, will keep working toward.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
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