Christine Taylor has opened up about the years she and Ben Stiller spent separated, and how an unexpected consequence of the pandemic brought them back together.
Speaking on the McBride Rewind podcast, Taylor, 54, described the period following their 2017 separation announcement as genuinely painful, even as she is now able to discuss it with clarity.
“I think at that moment in time for us we weren’t on the same page with a lot of things,” she told host Josh McBride.
“It was not light. It was not without a heavy heart and feeling really, even, dejected at the time of like this is not how I imagined it was going to be and we should have been able to work it out.”
Throughout the separation, the couple never lost touch entirely.
They continued co-parenting their children, daughter Ella, now 24, and son Quinlin, now 20, and spending time together as a family.
But it was the challenge of the Covid lockdown that proved to be the turning point.
With their daughter graduating high school and their son finishing eighth grade, the family found themselves under one roof with nowhere to go and nothing but time.
“If there’s a silver lining for us during Covid, that was the little gift,” Taylor said.
“We all kind of bubbled up together with our kids… Ben and I spent a lot of time just working on us with a therapist and we’d log into Zoom and we’d do our therapy sessions and really found the way back.”
She was thoughtful about why people tend not to discuss this kind of thing openly.
“I think it’s something people don’t love to talk about because it feels like a failure,” she said, before making the case that the work itself, whatever its outcome, is worthwhile.
“If the right answer for us was that it didn’t work, but we were able to figure that out very clearly and focused, then that’s great too. Long-term marriages are a lot of work.”
The outcome in their case, she said, was emerging from the process “really stronger and better than ever.”
Stiller confirmed as much in a 2022 Esquire interview, describing the reconciliation as “unexpected, and one of the things that came out of the pandemic,” and saying the marriage now works because they have come to accept both their differences and their similarities.
The couple, who wed in 2000, were most recently spotted skipping a Knicks game to attend the Met Gala together last month, which, as public statements of a rekindled romance go, is fairly hard to misread.
