When did Ben Stiller separate from his wife? Actor says he was “lost” during separation

Ben Stiller spoke candidly about his past separation from Christine Taylor, revealing how the difficult period forced him to reassess what mattered most. The pair, who had been together for 17 years, separated in 2017. Though Stiller’s professional life continued to thrive, the actor admitted that personally, he felt unsteady.

Following the 2020 death of his father, Jerry Stiller, the Night at the Museum star began developing a documentary about his parents titled Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. The film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 5, offered Stiller an emotional lens through which to revisit his family’s past.

In the film, Stiller said,

“My career had been going along for a long time but things actually weren’t great in my personal life. I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids and just kind of a little bit lost,” he explained, per People.

Reflecting on his parents’ relationship, Stiller explained that their ability to withstand professional and personal strain inspired him to look inward.

“I started to think about my parents and all the stress and tension I remember seeing as a kid and the pressure when they were working together and how they stayed together through it. … I think I wanted to somehow understand how they did it,” he shared.

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Ben Stiller reflects on how separation from Christine Taylor made their bond stronger:

For Ben Stiller, there always seemed to be something about Christine Taylor that time couldn’t change. The Severance director, had spent the past few years balancing acclaim at work with reflection at home. Long before the awards and renewed spotlight, Ben Stiller had gone through a private reckoning, separating from Taylor after nearly two decades of marriage.

Looking back, he said the distance between them ended up teaching him more about love than success ever could. He shared his feelings in an interview with The New York Times published January 11.

“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,” he explained.

Ben Stiller and Taylor, who tied the knot in 2000, share two children, daughter Ella Olivia, 23, and son Quinlin Dempsey, 20. Even while apart, Ben Stiller admitted that part of him always believed they’d find their way back.

“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,” he shared.

What started as an unexpected living arrangement during lockdown slowly evolved into something deeper.

“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,” he shared.

Ben Stiller paused on what that reunion meant for him, summing it up in the simplest way possible.

“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.”

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Christine Taylor opens up about love, growth and reuniting with Ben Stiller during lockdown:

As per an article published by E! News on March 8, 2023, Christine Taylor looked back on how she and Ben Stiller managed to find their way back to each other after time apart. Appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show, the actress shared that their reunion during the COVID-19 pandemic happened in the most unexpected but natural way.

“We got married very quickly after meeting each other, we knew each other six months, got engaged, married within the year and had Ella that next year,” she shared.

Taylor reflected on how, in the entertainment industry, it’s easy for couples to drift into different directions despite good intentions.

“I think Ben and I both started to grow in different directions, and when we made the decision to separate, it was not something we wanted to talk publicly about or took lightly,” she shared.

That decision, she explained, came from an honest need to understand where they were in life.

“That’s going back three or four years, and during that time apart, we got to know who we are,” she shared.

For Taylor, that space turned out to be meaningful rather than final.

“I feel like we needed some time to figure that out, and we always stayed a family unit and always continued to do things together.”

When the pandemic arrived, the family, like many others, found themselves sharing one space again. What could have been tense or uncertain turned into something restorative.

“When the pandemic hit and we all had to figure out where we were going to hunker down, we all ended up in our house together, we found this way back. We had so much time to talk. There were no other distractions,” Christine explained.

She described the experience as something that unfolded naturally.

Labeling the situation a “really special time,” she shared that it all happened “organically.” And after everything, Taylor summed it up saying:

“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, there is a freedom in the comfort of this relationship and the commitment.”