Ben Stiller Opens Up About Zoolander 2 Bombing in Theaters

Zoolander 2 director Ben Stiller opened up about the movie bombing in theaters. David Duchovny's Fail Better podcast counted the beloved actor as a guest this week. The Zoolander star says that seeing the sequel go down in flames was "not a great experience." Stilller would offer other thoughts on the project. Back in the last decade, the idea of another Zoolander seemed like a great idea. A beloved hit from the early Aughts brought back for an audience that had just become old enough to start sniffing around nostalgia. However, the movie was a box office disappointment and sent the star down a path of self-reflection. Check out what he had to say about the experience with his friend down below.

"I thought everybody wanted this," Stiller recalled "And then it's like, 'Wow, I must have really fucked this up. Everybody didn't go to it. And it's gotten these horrible reviews.'"

"It really freaked me out because I was like, 'I didn't know was that bad?'" Stiller would add. "What scared me the most on that one was l'm losing what I think what's funny, the questioning yourself … on 'Zoolander 2,' it was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time."

"The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said 'Make "Zoolander 3″ right now,' or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that," the star considered. "But I had this space to kind of sit with myself and have to deal with it and other projects that I had been working on — not comedies, some of them — I have the time to actually just work on and develop."

Stiller Doing Much Better With Severance Now

While Zoolander 2 might not have landed, Apple TV+'s Severance has been a massive hit with audiences all over. When the show was announced, a lot of people were a bit confused about the notion of Stiller handling this strange concept. ComicBook.com spoke to the director and his series star Adam Scott about the strange world of Severance. It's clear that both of these performers see that there's some humor in the kind of existential drama of this show.

"I'm not comparing it or trying to somehow do something intentionally, other than I want to explore stuff that I'm interested in, and for me as a director and an actor, which, for a long time, I did both at the same time, but I haven't done that for a while," Stiller previously told ComicBook.com. "So it's really fun to explore different ideas and different tones both as a director and an actor. So if something's good, that's really what excites me about it ... So I couldn't tell you why, honestly, the last thing I did, Escape at Dannemora, why that was something that I gravitated towards. I just thought it would be a really cool story to tell, and I'd want to see it. And I felt the same thing with this one."

Did you like both Zoolanders? Check out all the pop culture discussion on social media at @ComicBook!