"I hate myself"- When Ben Stiller opened up about the reception to his movie
Ben Stiller has been a force in the industry for decades now, and the actor has pretty much covered a lot of ground to reach where he is now. His achievements include an Emmy Award, a Directors Guild of America Award, a Britannia Award, and a Teen Choice Award, and the actor is far from done.
But almost every actor like Ben Stiller goes through rough phases in their lives. For Stiller, this came after the release of Reality Bits, which did not quite add up to the response that it was expected to. Though the movie has aged well, Ben Stiller revealed in an interview with Interview Magazine long ago that after the movie was released, no one wanted to work with him.
He told Manhola Dargis:
"I guess I hit the skids for a while. After Reality Bites my name was dirt in this town. Nobody wanted to arrest me."
When asked if he expected more from the movie, he said:
"I don’t know. I started with zero assumptions: I hate myself. I s*ck. I should be run out of town. I can’t believe I got this far."
He also expanded further on this when Dargis said that he was a catholic and "self-flagellation is not an option."
"I don’t feel like I have a very clear idea of what I’m supposed to be"- Ben Stiller on his idea of self
While discussing his reception to Reality Bits, the actor came to his religion and eventually talked about what he felt about himself. When Dargis commented that he shouldn't be self-flagellating because he was catholic, he contradicted, saying he was actually Jewish.
He went on to say that he did not yet know what he was or hoped to be. He said:
"No, I’m Jewish, but my mom’s Catholic, so the guilt area is covered. I have the highest expectations, along with the lowest. I tried to put as much of myself as possible in Reality Bites, but in terms of my humor, I’m still trying to figure out what my sensibility is. It’s a process, really. I don’t feel like I have a very clear idea of what I’m supposed to be, or even of how people perceive me, except that I got put into this Generation X file."
He continued:
"Last year, I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary. It was Mick Jagger’s idea."
Of course, Ben Stiller has had setbacks, but he has done a lot since this interview in 1996.
Ben Stiller has worked in acclaimed movies like Flirting with Disaster (1996), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Greenberg (2010), While We're Young (2014), and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), among many others. Of course, his dominant genre still remains comedy, and he widely remains one of the most popular actors in the genre, with films like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) and Meet the Parents (2000).
He most recently appeared in Nutcrackers and Dear Santa and is soon set to appear in The Dink and Happy Gilmore 2.
