Christine Taylor candidly discussed how she and husband Ben Stiller reconciled years after their “challenging” 2017 split, crediting the COVID-19 pandemic for helping the pair reconcile.
“If there was a silver lining for us during COVID, that was the little gift,” Taylor, 54, said while appearing on the Tuesday, May 26, episode of “The McBride Rewind” podcast. “We all kind of bubbled up together with the kids. Our daughter was graduating high school at the time, our son was graduating eighth grade.”
Taylor added that she and Stiller, 60, had “nothing but time,” so they “spent a lot of time just working on us with a therapist.” She continued, “We’d log into Zoom and we’d do our therapy sessions and really found the way back.”
The couple — who got married in 2000 and share kids Ella, 24, and Quinlin, 20 — announced they were separating in May 2017.
“We were just not on the same page with a lot of things and working so hard to try to make it fit and make it right,” Taylor explained of their split. “And I think really when we kind of just zoomed out on it, it was like, ‘Let’s just put a pause here.’”
Taylor added that breaking up was the best option for them at the time, though “it was very difficult to come to that decision.”
“It was not without, you know, 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,’” she said. “I mean, it was challenging.”
While Taylor and Stiller didn’t confirm they were back together until 2022, they were always connected through their children.
“We were always in contact,” Taylor said. “We were coparenting together. We were spending time together as a family.”
Stiller previously spoke about his split from Taylor in his October 2025 documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, admitting that he often compared their relationship to the relationship of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
“When we separated, my feeling was, like, ‘Oh, I’m failing at this and look at my parents. They have this incredible 60 plus years of marriage and I can’t live up to that,’” Stiller said, referring to his late mother and father, who were married for 61 years.
Stiller added that he felt an “aversion” to working with Taylor. The couple has worked together on several projects, including Zoolander, Tropic Thunder, Dodgeball, Dedication and Friendsgiving.
Taylor, who also appeared in the documentary, acknowledged Stiller had a “history” of couples working together because his parents were frequent collaborators.
“I think a lot of it was your experience about what that ultimately meant for a relationship. It can put extra strain when you’re eating, sleeping, breathing each other in that way,” she said. “I also felt like there was a fear for you for me of what that would look like to the outside world. I mean it was very loaded.”
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