Ben Stiller admits ‘worst decision’ of his life was cutting daughter from beloved movie

The pair were both set to star in 2013’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’

Ben Stiller has told his daughter Ella that cutting her out of his 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was the “worst decision” he has ever made.

The Zoolander star, 59, directed and starred in the adaptation of James Thurber’s 1939 short story.

In his new Apple TV documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Stiller examines his relationship with his own parents, the acclaimed comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.

He also reckons with how his experiences growing up with them would later shape him as a father.

In a discussion about his “perfectionism”, which he believes he inherited from his father, Stiller tells his 23-year-old daughter, Ella, that he struggled to cut her from what would have been her film debut.

“I cut you out of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’s probably the worst decision I ever made in my life,” says Stiller.

In response, Ella tells her father that she was “really scared” during filming, and accepts that the short scene she was in “didn’t make sense in the movie”.

Ben Stiller and his daughter Ella pictured in New York in October 2024 (Getty for Equality Now)

Ella had been set to play a younger version of Odessa Mitty, the sister of Stiller’s titular character Walter Mitty. She has since landed film and television credits in projects including And Just Like That... and Happy Gilmore 2.

Stiller said the decision felt like more than a simple edit, explaining: “For me, it kind of goes deeper. What it relates to is my own issues with my own obsession with my work, or ‘perfectionism’.”

Stiller’s 20-year-old son Quin, who also features in the documentary, tells his father that his dedication to his work created distance within the family.

“I think there’s things, you know, after a tough day or something was going wrong, you can get very much in your own head,” says Quin. “And I think, once you kind of go into that place ... [it’s] hard to get you out of it. So that would kind of put a damper on the fun part about being on vacation.”

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Quin goes on: “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.”

Stiller reflects that he had similar experiences growing up with his own comedy-star parents, and believed he didn’t want to “end up” like them.

“The irony is, I thought I was doing so much better than my parents. I thought I was pulling it off,” says Stiller. “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 – 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.”

Elsewhere in the documentary, Stiller also reflected on the ups and downs of his marriage to Christine Taylor.