Ben Stiller has had an extensive, if somewhat narrowly focused, acting career. As a
comic actor, he frequently reprises two essential character variations, the sympathetic, put-upon idiot, and the over-the-top aggressively narcissistic idiot. For heightened comic absurdity, he has on occasion appeared in films (usually in the first variation) where one of his burdens is the
oddity of his parents. Now, in reality, Stiller is known for having genuinely odd parents,
Jerry Stiller and
Ann Meara.
* In
Meet the Fockers, his parents are
Dustin Hoffman and
Barbra Streisand (Focker, and Mother Focker).
* In
Zoolander, his father is a coal-mining
Jon Voight (Zoolander's
agent being played by Jerry Stiller).
*
Flirting With Disaster features
Mary Tyler Moore and
George Segal as his adoptive parents, and
Alan Alda and
Lily Tomlin as the biological parents he seeks. Along the way several other people are initially teased as his biological parents, and then revealed not to be (first tall blond
Celia Weston, and then plausible but still wrong dad candidate
David Patrick Kelly).
* In
The Royal Tenenbaums (thanks
avalyn!!) his parents were played by Tenenbaum family patriarchs
Anjelica Houston and
Gene Hackman.
* In
Keeping the Faith (thanks
Auduster!!) he's a fun rabbi with a mother keen to fix him up, played by
Anne Bancroft (but with no father in sight).
* And in
Heavyweights, Stiller plays cruel fitness-loving fat-camp owner Tony Perkins, and
his own father.
* Now, I originally posted this list in 2017, and Stiller and Hoffman must have come across it, because in 2017 they decided to have Dustin Hoffman again take up the role of Stiller's father in
The Meyerwitz Stories (thanks
e2renata for the tip!!), with
Adam Sandler as Stiller's half-brother, and
Candice Bergen as his birth-mother.
* But perhaps the most impressively on-the-nose casting of the father of Ben Stiller harks back to 2008, when the dad was....
Bernie Mac in
Madagascar 2 (thanks again
e2renata) -- Bernie Mac voices Zuba, the alpha-lion father of Stiller's forlorn dancing zoo lion Alex, with Stiller's mother being voiced by
Sherri Shepherd.
It is not completely clear what characteristics qualify somebody to play a parent of Ben Stiller's, but one component is surely the capacity to act with an absurdly outsized
persona.