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Ben Stiller talked about his years-long divorce from wife Christine Taylor and the factors that finally led to their reconciliation.
In a January 11 interview with The New York Times, Stiller described their 2017 breakup, saying, "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."
The director of Severance went on to say that, in his opinion, his split from Taylor—with whom he has two children, Quinlin, 19, and Ella, 22—was never meant to last.
"In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together," Stiller, who married his co-star in Zoolander in 2000, stated. "I don’t know where Christine was; you’d have to ask her, but COVID put us all together in the same house."
Being back together starting in 2020, according to the Dodgeball actor, marked a turning point in their relationship and gave the estranged couple a chance to get back together.
"It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together," said Stiller. However, I'm really appreciative of it, and I believe not many people do come back together when they separate."
"When you return, there's nothing like that," he added. "You have so much more appreciation for what you have because we know we could not have it."
When Taylor talked candidly about their breakup a few years ago, she expressed a similar viewpoint, pointing out how fast they had moved on from their first date more than two decades prior.
"We got married very quickly after meeting each other," she stated in 2023 during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show. "We knew each other six months, got engaged, married within the year, and had Ella that next year."
"I think Ben and I both started to grow in different directions," Taylor thought. Additionally, when we decided to part ways, it wasn't something we wanted to talk publicly about or took lightly."
While they "needed some time to figure that out," the Brady Bunch movie actress went on to say that "during that time apart, [they] got to know who [they] are" and that they "always stayed a family unit and always continued to do things together."
With "so much time to talk" and "no other distractions," Stiller and Taylor were able to lay everything out on the table when the pandemic struck and they returned to living together.
"I feel like when you've lived a lifetime with someone like we have—and we learned as we were going along—there's a freedom in that," she said. "There is a freedom in the comfort of this relationship and the commitment."
