Although New York Magazine popularized the term ‘nepo baby‘ in 2022, Ben Stiller has long been familiar with criticism over having famous parents.
The Emmy winner, who pays tribute to his parents in the documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, explained that he understands arguments “about access,” but considers it “a selling point” to have grown up around the industry.
“I think it’s kinda like that Brat Pack thing, right? New York Magazine, they coined a phrase, and then it just became a thing,” he said on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show.
“But it’s always been what it is, in humanity and life. It’s like, you buy a violin, a Stradivarius or whatever, it’s been in the family for hundreds of years. That’s a selling point.”
Stiller continued, “But I also understand there are other arguments to be made about access and all those things. My feeling is … if it’s in your blood, if it’s your passion and you grew up around it—for me, I think growing up around it, talking about all these things that I saw with my parents, you, actually as a kid, see the dark underside of it, the stress, the effects it has on relationships. You see that up close as a kid, and then you still wanna go into it.”
The Severance EP, whose parents are the late Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, noted he got his first job in the 1986 off-Broadway revival of House of Blue Leaves after he got an audition “as a favor” for his mom because he “couldn’t get in cause the casting director didn’t wanna see me.”
“But I felt like, doing that audition, I knew that I had done what I needed to get the part,” explained Stiller. “If you have to passion, you need to do it. You need to go for it.”
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