Ben Stiller recalls open letter asking Hollywood to 'stop putting' him in comedies: 'I love doing what I do'

Ben Stiller may not know why he emerged as a comedic movie star — but he's glad he embraced the genre while he could.

The actor, who became a comedy movie staple with titles like Meet the Parents and Zoolander, recently recalled on the New York Times podcast, The Interview, that not everyone was such a fan of seeing his comedic stylings on the big screen.

"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,'" Stiller recalled. "I was just like, I don’t know, I’m here, I love doing what I do."

Stiller said he still isn't sure why audiences responded so well to his screen presence, but looking back on it, is grateful to have been such a big part of the comedy movie zeitgeist of the late '90s and early '00s.

"It’s only in retrospect that I can go, 'Wow, there was a thing happening that I was fortunate to be a part of,'" he shared. "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."

Stiller’s film success came on the heels of his acclaimed MTV sketch comedy show, The Ben Stiller Show, a gig he landed after departing the cast of Saturday Night Live after just four episodes. Though a job on the NBC late night show was a coveted position for any aspiring comedian, leaving felt like the best decision for Stiller who noted, "I couldn’t do well there because I wasn’t great at live performing." 

He quipped, "My mom would have been better on that show. I got too nervous."

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After cultivating an audience with his own show, Stiller grew even bigger with such comedies as Heavyweights, Flirting with Disaster, There's Something About Mary, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and more. Was he strategic about the titles he chose?  "I don’t think so, because I don’t think I’m that smart," he joked to the Times.

He added, "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.'"

Of course, those decisions looked different when it came to signing on for sequels. "At that point you’ve got a team together," Stiller said, pointing to the Night at the Museum sequels. "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."

Most recently Stiller served as a director and producer on the first and latest season of Severance, the dark sci-fi series that presents a corporate dystopia where office workers are surgically altered to maintain a work-life balance. At the same time, Stiller hasn't veered too far away from his comedic roots. 

Just last month, Entertainment Weekly confirmed that a fourth Meet the Parents movie is in the works, with Stiller and franchise costars Robert De Niro, Teri Polo, and Blythe Danner expected to return.