podcast
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Grief can feel so lonely but talking about it and listening to others share their experiences helps. In all new episodes of this award-winning podcast, Anderson Cooper continues his deeply personal exploration of grief in all its complexities. In moving and honest discussions, he learns from others who have faced life-altering losses. Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis
Ben Stiller: Facing His Past
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Dec 10, 2025
Ben Stiller spent the last few years going through boxes of photos, letters, and recordings that his parents, the famous comedy duo known as "Stiller and Meara," left behind. He shares with Anderson the parallels he discovered between his parents and himself and how it has made him re-think his past and his own parenting.
Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis.
Host: Anderson Cooper
Showrunner: Haley Thomas
Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams
Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring
Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski
Technical Director: Dan Dzula
Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher
Episode Transcript
Anderson Cooper
00:00:01
'Welcome to All There Is. I've been listening to voicemails and videos we've received over the last few weeks. They're deeply moving, and I'll be putting together a special episode of the podcast soon, which is made up of them. You can record a video and email it to us if you want. The address is [email protected]. You can also message the videos to us on Instagram @allthereis, and you can leave us voicemails at 404-827-1805. We'd love to hear from you. I want to play you a message I heard just this morning.
Grace
00:00:33
My name is Grace. One thing I've learned in my grief, now being almost five years since my mom died by suicide, I've learned, especially as we're approaching the holidays, that the best place to be on a holiday for me is where there's no expectations of me. And where I don't put expectations on myself because I think I have to make a good impression or I think I'm bringing the moon down. And it took me a four and a half years I didn't find it, but I did. She is my high school chemistry teacher and I've been babysitting her kids and I go to birthday parties and I go to Thanksgivings and Christmases and if I wanna talk about my mom, they listen. And if I wanna cancel at the last minute, I won't hurt anyone's feelings. By choosing you and your grief on holidays, you may rustle feathers like I do, like my blood family. But for me on holidays, I feel like those are the days where I let myself just pick me. One thing I'm gonna ask though, someone told me yesterday that they read a book that's in the fifth year of grief is hardest. And I responded by telling them every year, at least one person has told me that the year I'm in is the hardest year. The first year is the hardest. The second year is the hardest. The third year is the hardest. And I asked them: what year is the easiest? When will I have the easiest year? And I really hope I haven't already had it because living without my mom for five years is just too many. And I one day I'll surpass her in age and I'll surpass the ten that I had with her and I I don't wanna think about that and I I don't know what to do. Yeah, so if anyone's left a voicemail telling you what year is the easiest, I'd love to know.
Anderson Cooper
00:02:18
It can be hard when you hear others put a timetable on grief or opine on how you should feel or what you should do. I'd never say it gets easy, but it can and does change. It can and does get easier. I think about what Nick Cave said on last week's podcast about the transformation he underwent after his fifteen year old son Arthur died.
Nick Cave
00:02:41
There was some years or a year at least of absolute devastating, incapacitating sorrow. At the time, you think that it's simply unbearable. And you learn ultimately that actually it's not. You can bear it. And all sorts of extraordinary things happen within this thing that we call grief. That way of thinking is something that comes through time. It's not some sort of failure if you're not feeling that way. It takes a it takes a long time. It's a it's a it takes a long long time, but g beautiful things often do, you could say.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:25
We'll be right back with actor, director, writer Ben Stiller, who spent the last few years going through the things his parents left behind. Welcome back. My guest today is actor, writer, and director Ben Stiller. His mom, Anne Meara, died in 2015, and his dad, Jerry Stiller, in 2020. They were a famous comedy duo, and Ben has spent the last several years going through and making a film about all the things they left behind. It's called Stiller and Meara: Nothing Is Lost, and is playing now on Apple TV.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:59
Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. You and I have something in common, which is we both went through our parents' stuff. Did you wait a while to start going through stuff?
Ben Stiller
00:04:13
'No. When my dad died, He died in 2020 - in may of 2020. And like a week or two after that I started going through stuff. I kind of got this like weird sort of like panic. It was the apartment I grew up in. It was the place we always went back to and it just it's home. It felt like home base. So then to think about it not being in our family, and that was because they were leaving the apartment to my sister and I knew she wanted to sell it. It was kind of like this knee-jerk reaction of like I just I I'm not gonna remember this place fully. I wanna just film it so I can
Anderson Cooper
00:04:49
You want to document it.
Ben Stiller
00:04:50
Yeah. That was the instinct. I really am like a very visual person. So like just to have those visuals of the place, you know, to be able to look at it and study it and kind of like just remember it, or if I was ever thinking of that that was the main impetus. But then there was also then of course all this stuff of theirs.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:05
Did you know that your dad had made cassette recordings of conversations? Did you know you had this library?
Ben Stiller
00:05:13
'He had all of these hundreds of hours of tapes that were a combination of cassette recordings, everything from my dad having like a little mini cassette recorder to record my my kids, you know, as a grandparent, to going back to these real-to-reel tapes that he would record their improvisation sessions that they would do to write their sketches.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:35
'I did this by myself going through these boxes, and I found it- it's the reason I started this podcast, because I found it to be such a kind of lonely and fraught process of opening up these boxes.
Ben Stiller
00:05:48
Even talking about it. It's like when you start thinking about it, it's just it's just there's so much stuff there that like every single piece, whether it's a photograph or like a cufflink or you know, these like little like tchotchkis and things that like just ended up in like the drawer by my mom's bedside table, every single one of them would kind of take you down could take you down like a whole avenue of of memory or
Anderson Cooper
00:06:15
Everything is infused with memory.
Ben Stiller
00:06:17
Yeah. That sort of feeling that it's a piece of them or a connection. I'm like trying on some some glasses and they're actually they're my mother's father's glasses. And that that suitcase that we have is my mom's father's suitcase that she had saved that I'd never looked at before. But the glasses I find very personal because that's something that someone wore every day and...
Anderson Cooper
00:06:40
And their eyes looked through that into your eyes.
Ben Stiller
00:06:42
Yeah. Yeah. And then if they become these artifacts, they're like they're part of your parents. I don't know. There's something just v very heavy about that too.
Anderson Cooper
00:06:50
My basement is still full of these boxes and I just have not It's really I just can't do it. Like I do it in bed.
Ben Stiller
00:06:56
Well it's kind of a crazy. Yeah, it's kind of like a crazy Sisophean type of thing.. Because you're like always go I I like go through stuff and then it's like, okay, I'm gonna put this stuff over here and this stuff over here. But then it's also like, then what? What am I gonna do with that? And then like how do you dig into that stuff too? How do you start that process? Because when you start to listen to a tape that's like an hour of my parents improvising and talking. I mean there must be thousands of hours of recording. I know there's hundreds that w that that we found. And that really takes you down the rabbit hole. It's something fascinating to me about hearing just the sounds of the apartment and the phone ringing in the background or things like that that make it feel so real and in the moment.
Anderson Cooper
00:07:36
Well, also seeing those old Super 8 films that your dad shot, I mean it's so New York circa 1972, 73. Yeah. I had the same jacket you wore. Like the there was snow on the streets and snow days and just funky sneakers and snow days were exciting. Big hair, and just messiness. And you know, we watched Wonderama.
Ben Stiller
00:08:01
Yeah. We watch I went to Wonderama once.
Anderson Cooper
00:08:04
Every kid who would go to Wonderama would get a like a glazed bagel with their name on it on a necklace. Right. And they would always wear it to school and they'd be like, Oh yeah, no, yeah, it was a Wonderama. And I never got to go to Wonderama. I was like...[laughs] But it's interesting because part of the thing for me in going through these boxes, which is really difficult, and I'll take a box and I'll think, okay, I'm gonna make progress today. I'm gonna do a box, and it's a box of Christmas cards from 1974. Like how meaningful can this be? And I'm going through it, and then some of it are people who I knew and I remember Walter Matthau, his wife Carol was my mom's best friend. Oona Chaplin and Charlie Chaplin's Christmas cards. And see, that's incredible. But like what do you do with that stuff? Because everything feels like a piece of my mom or my dad or my past.
Ben Stiller
00:08:50
Right.
Anderson Cooper
00:08:50
And yet it's not.
Ben Stiller
00:08:51
Right. Yeah. It's hard like you start to organize stuff and then you're like, well why what is this then what do I do with this? Ultimately I think it's I hear my dad's voice in my head when I'm doing it because he was very much about saving stuff. It's funny though, 'cause it gets exhausting too in the moment when you're doing it. I think after a little while it just gets tiring too because...
Anderson Cooper
00:09:09
And to stop, actually.
Ben Stiller
00:09:10
Yeah, and then you're like, well and then you start to get like a little bit like, I guess like do I keep the Charlie Chaplin Christmas card or not? I don't you know, I don't know. No, let's put it in other words, you like get a little wiped out in the moment and you kind of forget even like how im like how much this it's like you just keep all this stuff, it's great to have it. And then you do find, I think, the little things that mean something to you.
Anderson Cooper
00:09:31
'I've come to the realization I'm trying to make sense of what happened. Like what was this entire experience of growing up in the family that I grew up in that's so in my mind, like saturated with colors and the smell of Rigaud candles and cigarettes and clinking glasses and people drinking. And it's so funny they have so many similar like parties at the house and famous people who you see on television suddenly in your house. My parents gave when Charlie Chaplin came back to America after being in exile to receive a special academy award, he and Oona flew to New York first, and my parents gave him a big welcome party. And there's a photo in the New York Times of me shaking Charlie Chaplin's hand in 19-... I was six or seven years old.
Ben Stiller
00:10:17
Wow. Did you did you did you know?
Anderson Cooper
00:10:20
Yeah, they they gave me a whole like course of study of we watched Charlie Chaplin films, but of course he looked nothing like The Little Tramp. So I was like, who's this old guy? But for you, was it a sad thing to do this?
Ben Stiller
00:10:35
I think ultimately even if you feel a little closer or you learn something, you are left feeling the sadness of I still miss them and all of this searching and all of this connecting or making a movie or writing about it or anything. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you're still dealing with well just the reality of what it is to be a human being and not have people around who you loved. For me, making the movie, the first two and a half years of working on it were not like very happy. There were so many times when I didn't want to deal, really deal with going into that stuff. Yeah. Because when 'cause when you do go into it, it brings up the the the diff the different feelings. I think both of our childhoods, we were around adults a lot who were partying and living their lives in that way that parents in the 70s did, which was for us as kids, it's like we had to figure it out on our own.
Anderson Cooper
00:11:32
Yeah. My mom took me to Studio 54 when I was eleven twice.
Ben Stiller
00:11:35
So you know I went to Studio 54 when I was 13. This is so weird. It was like letting children into studio.
Anderson Cooper
00:11:42
I'm obsessed with the patterns of history that run through families and how we find ourselves repeating the patterns of those who've come before us. You you grew up with these parents who were working constantly, who needed to work to support the family. They were on the road a lot.
Ben Stiller
00:11:58
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:11:58
And then you had kids and you ended up repeating the pattern of your parents with your kids.
Ben Stiller
00:12:03
I did. Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:04
And I think that's a good thing.
Ben Stiller
00:12:05
Think about how how that happened because I'll always being aware of thinking, oh, I I don't want to make the mistakes that my parents made or things they did as parents that weren't, you know, the best. But I think for me what happened is like my relationship with my work it became very important to me and probably like out of balance with really attending to all the relationships in my life.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:30
I well understand the perspective you have about your work. It is the same I have and it is very difficult for anybody around me. I get laser focused and I'm a perfectionist. Like it's so obvious the way it has to be and nothing else is acceptable.
Ben Stiller
00:12:47
Right.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:47
And no one else understands this. I'm just trying to make it perfect. That's all I want.
Ben Stiller
00:12:51
Yeah, these are the people in your life who love you.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:54
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Stiller
00:12:56
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:56
Yeah.
Ben Stiller
00:12:57
On your deathbed. These are the people you hope for.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:59
Yeah, and they're not gonna be around. I want to be present in the lives of my kids. And yet I I watch this and I realize it's not enough to think that and to realize that. It's you actually have to work on it every single day and take action on it.
Ben Stiller
00:13:15
Which I think is an advantage when when you do have kids when you're not, you know, like super young because...
Anderson Cooper
00:13:21
What are you saying? Yeah, I'm fifty. Okay, fine.
Ben Stiller
00:13:26
I know. I started late too you know.
Anderson Cooper
00:13:27
No, you got it together.
Ben Stiller
00:13:29
No, but like I I you know, I wasn't super young myself. Like I was like 35 or 30, right? That's not really young to have kids. But even then, I think if like if I had 'em now, it would be a whole different thing because I think I do have a little more self awareness in that in that area. But or maybe it's because I learned it through trial and error. But there was a blind spot for me. As much as I had these ideas about my parents and what they got right and what they didn't get right, it I it didn't jibe with my ambitions or my creative drive. I didn't understand that that I was actually doing the the same thing.
Anderson Cooper
00:14:07
That's the thing like that I'm kind of like, wow, that's really like I really missed that. There's a conversation you have in the film with your son. Let's play that.
Quinlan Stiller
00:14:16
You know, after a tough day, you know, or something was going wrong, you can get very much in your own head, you know what I mean? And I think once you kind of go into that place, hard to get you out of it. So that would kind of put a damper on the, you know, fun part about being on vacation. You know what I mean? You have all these hats that you're trying to balance, you know, being a director, an actor, you know, a producer, a writer, but also just like a father, right? And sometimes I felt that that would come, you know, last to these other things.
Ben Stiller
00:14:55
The irony is I thought I was doing so much better than my parents. I thought I was pulling it off. I was flying home on the weekends and having special places for the kids to play when they come visit the set, but in reality and just hearing them talk about it, you know, for them, it was the same thing I was going through as a kid, and I just couldn't see that at all at the time.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:22
I find that devastating.
Ben Stiller
00:15:23
Yeah, it's not it's even when I listen to it, I'm like I was not expecting him to say last when he said you know, I thought he was gonna say like maybe like not at the top of the when he said last. It was like but like look, it's valid because that's his experience. We all learn as you have kids and they get older that kids take in everything we took in as kids, they're taking it.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:48
That scene made me think, my five year old, what is he gonna say in twenty years?
Ben Stiller
00:15:53
Right.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:54
I'm actively thinking, okay, what do I need to do now? I mean I've already made I feel like I've made
Ben Stiller
00:16:00
The fact that you're asking those questions, honestly, is that's all you can do. You know what I mean?
Anderson Cooper
00:16:04
Well, you can do more than that.
Ben Stiller
00:16:06
Right. Of course. But even to be aware of it is the key, you know? And all you can do is do do the best you can.
Anderson Cooper
00:16:17
But that perfectionism is something your dad had as well. Yeah. Almost all the time, I feel like he was in his head, which I again I really identify with.
Anderson Cooper
00:16:28
There's a conversation that he recorded between your mom and him. It's essentially an argument where your mom is just saying, and we'll play in a second, that he's just joyless. That that he's so perfectionist that he sucks the joy out of everything.
Jerry Stiller
00:16:44
I know the work and what how people respond to you and how great your performances are under these conditions, no matter what. You are always there. I know all this. I'm aware of it.
Anne Meara
00:16:58
And then at the end, when things go happily decently, if your relief is embarrassing. It's like you just oh God, God, it was so great, it was so you know. How do you go over, how you're thought of as a good guy.
Jerry Stiller
00:17:16
I do want to be thought of as a good guy.
Anne Meara
00:17:19
It clutters the mind.
Jerry Stiller
00:17:19
No, it doesn't clutter my mind and no and you know we're looked upon very lovingly by people. Nobody's walking now and said, Look at this one thing. What?
Anne Meara
00:17:28
Before either of us leave this planet. There has to be some way you can get an authentic sense of yourself without worrying how you're received. It is joyless. Absolutely joyless.
Anderson Cooper
00:17:48
And I have been accused of this as well.
Ben Stiller
00:17:51
I agree. Me too. And I also I agree too. Like that's that's what hit me when I heard her say that was also like, yeah, that is I've had that feeling sometimes when I stress out about something so much. I like doing something on the Oscars or something where it's like a pressure moment to be funny or deliver, which is I I don't love doing those kinds of things because of that. Because what happens is I stress out so much about it that, you know, and then if it goes well, it's literally what she says. I'm just relieved. But you know, but it's not like I'm happy, like oh he's great. It's like no, I'm relieved. I think my mom was also responding to like her relationship with my dad in terms of how he was with people, because he was incredibly outgoing and generous and genuine in his interest in other people and connecting with people and wanting people, as he says, to like him. Which I again, like a very human thing that I really identify with too. But my dad was he didn't have any issues of saying, Yeah, I want everybody to love me 'cause I didn't really get loved when I was a kid. You know?
Anderson Cooper
00:18:55
We'll have more with Ben Stiller in a moment. If you want to listen or watch past episodes of this podcast, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts or at our grief community page at cnn.com/allthereis. You can also watch our new weekly companion show there, All There Is Live, Thursday nights at 9:15 pm Eastern. We'll be right back with more from Ben Stiller.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:18
Do you feel like you grieved your parents?
Ben Stiller
00:19:21
I still feel like I'm I'm going through that. I have these like moments of it's you know I think making the movie for me was a way to address connecting with my grief because I have such a barrier towards really opening up to that, I think. And maybe similar to you in that way where like if you made a documentary about your mom, your process in making this podcast, like you can take what you do and use it as a way to help yourself work through stuff. And I actually think that that's a lot of what art is and creativity is. It shouldn't be indulgent self therapy or whatever that nobody wants to see. And by the way, that was a concern I had too in making the movie. But I do think that being able to do this and have a way to delve into it through quote unquote work or you know, creative process was a way in for me to like start to connect with them. And now what I think it's opened up is I have these moments by myself where I try to connect with my parents a little bit.
Anderson Cooper
00:20:39
Do you feel them? Do you feel anything?
Anderson Cooper
00:20:41
No, that's that's the issue. [laughs] No, I but I mean I'm joking. But but look, I'm saying...
Anderson Cooper
00:20:46
I'm asking I'm saying this as somebody...I know it when I see it because I go through life not feeling anything.
Ben Stiller
00:20:52
Well I if you're like me, it's like somebody just going through life, you have to kinda like put up the deflector shields, right?
Anderson Cooper
00:20:58
Yes. No, I I Yeah.
Ben Stiller
00:20:59
But the problem is you get used to having them up and then when you let them down. But yes, I've had these weird moments, little spiritual kind of connection moments that I like they sound so silly, but like of a moment when you meet somebody or something and you feel like you're somehow connecting with your parent.
Anderson Cooper
00:21:19
Have you ever had that?
Ben Stiller
00:21:20
Yeah. I was at West Point scouting for a movie, you know, West Point up the Hudson, and I knew my mom had gone to boarding school up there at a place called Lady Cliff Academy that was in Highland Falls, New York. And I had never been able to find it. And I was in the West Point Visitor Center, and I asked somebody, I said, Hey, there's a place called Lady Cliff Academy. And he said, You're standing in it. This was Lady Cliff Academy. West Point bought it a few years ago as part of their thing. And then this woman recognized me there and she came up to me and she was so happy to see me. She gave me this big hug, was just so excited, and I was in that place in that moment, and I felt like I was somehow connecting with my mother in that moment. And there are those types of things that happen every once in a while. But then for me, I can just like sort of sit with these images. I have like a a screensaver on my computer of me and my mom when I was like nine years old. And those are these kind of touchstones where I can I feel okay, kind of just like going there and opening up and letting down the shields and just trying to be with them, you know?
Anderson Cooper
00:22:34
I stopped doing this podcast after the first season. It was just kind of overwhelming. And I had solicited voicemails from listeners and we got calls from people about their grief. And I listened over the course of about four months. And I still wasn't going to do any more podcasts, but it made me go back down to the basement and start going through these boxes again, which I stopped. And the first box I opened up was a box of my dad's papers. He was a writer. And I randomly picked this box and I opened up a file, first file, and it was an essay called The Importance of Grieving that he had written. And it was about the importance of children grieving and what happens to kids who don't grieve and how they go through their life with a certain melancholy they can never quite put their finger on. And I realized that's exactly what I had done. I had shut down as a kid and my entire life was spent keeping the grief buried and it made me realize I need to actually grieve. I need to actually feel allow myself to feel. And that's what I've been doing the last like two years. And it's been life changing. It's been extraordinary, but very difficult.
Ben Stiller
00:23:40
That feels like hit literally like him kind of reaching...
Anderson Cooper
00:23:43
Yeah, I mean it's again it's one of those moments like...
Ben Stiller
00:23:45
But that's like I mean that's almost undeniable. That's Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that in terms of letting yourself feel stuff?
Anderson Cooper
00:23:52
Well doing this podcast, talking to people just learning from other people how to grieve. I mean I literally am trying to learn how to grieve. It's been incredible. I mean Stephen Colbert.
Ben Stiller
00:24:02
Can you tell me what you learned?
Anderson Cooper
00:24:02
Stephen Colbert introduced me to the idea of grief as a gift and learning to l love the thing you most wish had never happened. There's a guy, Francis Weller, who's talked about you can develop making a companionship with grief. And this notion that others have taught me that you can still have a relationship with somebody who's died. And my relationship with my dad has changed. I know my dad better now than I ever did before. I've read his letters, and you know your dad better now than you did when he was alive, because you've read everything there is.
Ben Stiller
00:24:33
I definitely agree with that. That I feel like the people who are really close to you and that have made an impact and are a part of you, those relationships go on and continue. I know how because I how my much I think about them or the conversations I have in my head with them. But overall, I think the relationship with my parents has become I'm much more connected and interested. And now I besides being this age and being able to look at them through the eyes of having gone through a lot of experiences and having a lot more empathy for them. I just kind of also like can really appreciate them and maybe like five times a week people will come up to me about my parents saying, like, this happened to me, your dad did this for me, your mom said this to me, your mom told me to fuck off this time or whatever. I always have like a story of my mom saying saying to somebody, "oh get the fuck out of here." Because she loved to, you know, s sort of test people that way. But I feel she feels so alive. She's so interesting, smart. I have such an appreciation for her and my dad. I do feel like it's opened up a conversation with people, like the way you you know, you're talking to people but I think it's also the understanding a little bit more what it is to be a person. I just feel I feel better. I feel a little better about all of it, you know, like because it's out in the open.
Anderson Cooper
00:26:04
Well, even talking about, you know, your mom's drinking.
Ben Stiller
00:26:06
Exactly. Once I saw that it actually was like kind of opening up these conversations with people about their own experiences, which you were saying.
Anderson Cooper
00:26:14
Which by the way are conversations that are sorely needed and people are desperate to have, but it's just not something we really allow in society. It's just not something yeah we hold space for.
Ben Stiller
00:26:27
No, and especially in television, too. That's why the other part I was really fascinated with making the movie was the the archival seventies interviews, Gene Shalit, all those Mike Douglas, all those people like the David Susskind. These conversations that people would have on TV in that era were much more real. And that is the stuff that nobody talks about. Like you can't talk about death really on a TV talk show. I love Jimmy Fallon, but like I'm not going to talk about death on The Tonight Show. And you go out and you you want to have fun and be funny. But like the minute something comes up in your head, we go like, oh, that's something about disease or death or something. It's like, well, I can't talk about that.
Anderson Cooper
00:27:11
Well it's funny I do New Year's Eve with Andy Cohen.
Ben Stiller
00:27:13
Yes, you do.
Anderson Cooper
00:27:14
And he's always like, okay. And he's very much programming the whole thing. And so he'll be like, okay, we'll do your grief fortwo minutes. You get two minutes on grief. Do your grief thing?
Ben Stiller
00:27:24
What's Andy's relationship with grief?
Anderson Cooper
00:27:25
Oh, he's the happiest person I've ever met. I mean, he's he's thankfully both his parents are there and they're amazing. And but it's interesting to me because on New Year's Eve I will talk about grief because as a child I was watching the Dick Clark ball drop. My dad was in a hospital in 1978. I was 10 years old and he died five days later. And I remember watching the ball drop and just knowing something terrible was going to happen in this new year. And me mentioning it the minute or two that Andy allows me to on New Year's Eve, I cannot tell you the people who have reached out to me saying, you know what, I was watching the ball drop and really sad, and it's such a difficult night, and it meant so much that you said this thing about, you know, I see you see you out there if you're missing somebody. And I'm sure you will find that as more people see the film, just people coming up to you and talking about your parents to you, and it opens up a conversation which is actually the most meaningful conversations I have, and I get to have them all day long because people literally stop me everywhere I go to talk about people they've lost. And it's it's yeah, beautiful.
Ben Stiller
00:28:35
It's so valuable.
Anderson Cooper
00:28:37
Do you have any regrets? Because I there there's a recording that your dad made of he and you and your mom talking and your mom's just gotten off the phone with you and she's sad and she's like, "Oh, he was clipped." And your dad was like, "What, he didn't want to talk to you?" Which made me feel bad about not spending more time with my mom.
Ben Stiller
00:28:55
Yeah. That was actually one of the most uncomfortable things for me to hear when we when I found that 'cause that was being like you're in the bathroom in high school and hear someone talking about you know what I mean? But yet they're talking about their son.
Ben Stiller
00:29:08
ANd it's your parents. I know, and they're talking about like their son doesn't really want to hang out with them. But the thing is I don't feel sad for them. I feel bad that I was not able to like really appreciate, you know, I feel bad that I was so not self aware or like so wrapped up in my own stuff at the time. Now with a 20 year old and a 20 almost 24 year old, I'm lucky when I get a call from them during the week that they actually even want to talk or hang out because they're doing their own thing. So it it is a natural thing that happens, but I really kind of go more to like, oh God, I was so wrapped up in the work at that point. It was probably like what my son said. I would get in my head and. You know, disappear a little bit.
Anderson Cooper
00:29:53
You had like advanced prostate cancer that you found out about and had had to have s surgery for. Did did that make you think about your mortality?
Ben Stiller
00:30:02
Oh my God, yeah. When you get a diagnosis like that, everything stops, you know? All your plans, all your thoughts, my job, my it's like all of it's like, wait a minute, this is something that could change everything. It was scary, definitely scary. Nothing like the feeling of relief when you get the call from the doctor, hey, the blood test came back, your PSA is zero, you're cancer free, and you want to hold on to that feeling. For me, it's I think it's 11 years now. That feeling of gratitude. And I still do have that. But of course, like it goes up and down and you get wrapped up in things. But what I find even more kind of disturbing though is like I hear about people my age, I was Bill Burr has a funny routine about people just dropping dead. Like it's the age where like guys like fifties, sixties would just drop dead. That's very disconcerting. Because again, it's like we have all these plans and ideas and things we're doing, but it all could just be like no. Yeah, it's over. And honestly, like if it was over tomorrow it wouldn't be like, Oh yeah, he died kinda young, but you know, yeah, you had a you had a life. Right?
Anderson Cooper
00:31:16
Ben Stiller, thank you so much.
00:31:17
Thanks, man.
00:31:19
'Ben Stiller's film about his parents, Stiller and Meara: Nothing Is Lost, is out now. You can watch it on Apple TV. Next week, my conversation with actor Kelsey Grammar, whose 18-year-old sister Karen was murdered when Kelsey was 20. We talk about her loss and others he's experienced and the role that grief has played in his life.
Kelsey Grammar
00:31:39
There was always a note of tragedy in my life. Karen's murder was so horrible and so overwhelming that I I couldn't do anything but keep it with me. It was it stayed beside me for a long time. And even though I would still have moments when I would like live very well and happily and it would always come sneaking back in. And I and I think that's okay.
Anderson Cooper
00:32:01
That's next week on All There Is.