Ben Stiller has admitted that his daughter Ella has called him out for not being around as much as he could have been when she was growing up.
The Hollywood actor – and son of the popular Sixties comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara – compared his relationship with his daughter to the one he shared with his own parents in a new interview.
The Dodgeball and Meet the Parents actor told Esquire: “[Ella is] pretty articulate about it, and sometimes it’s stuff that I don’t want to hear.
“It’s hard to hear because it’s me not being there in the ways that I saw my parents not being there. And I had always thought, ‘Well I won’t do that.’”
Stiller added that he was “trying to navigate my own desire to fulfil the hopes and dreams I had”, adding: “And that doesn’t feel great, but it’s important to acknowledge.”
He said: “What I’ve learned is that your kids are not keeping score on your career. It would be solipsistic to think that my kids actually care about that.
“They just want a parent who’s emotionally present and supportive of them. That’s probably what they want more than for me to be going off and pushing the bounds of my creativity.”
The actor, 56, also has a son Quinlin, born in 2005, with his wife, the actor Christine Taylor. Stiller and Taylor starred together in the films Zoolander, Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder.
Stiller served as the director on the Apple drama Severance, which is out now. Read The Independent’s review here.
