Christine Taylor has revealed she and Ben Stiller both thought their blossoming romance in 1999 was a “rebound”, but he proposed just six months later.
Christine Taylor and Ben Stiller both thought their relationship was a “rebound romance”.
The 55-year-old former Brady Bunch Movie star first met her Zoolander co-star in 1999 when they were working on an unaired TV pilot called Heat Vision and Jack.
She told the We’re Still Here, Babes podcast: “That became the beginning of an entirely new chapter of my life, because Ben and I hit it off on the set.
“We went on a date towards the end of the shoot, and then just kind of went on this whirlwind romance.
“We both thought [it] was our sort of rebound romance, ‘cause I had just broken up with someone, and he was just getting out of something.”
Christine explained they were both keeping things on the “down-low” as they explored their feelings for each other.
She added: “We just were having fun, and just having a great time together. We kinda kept it on the down-low, it wasn’t like I was telling — I told my closest friends and family, but not my peripheral group of friends for a while.”
Just six months later, Ben, now 60, proposed and the couple started “planning a wedding”.
She added: “We took a big leap. And then yeah, then we got married in May of 2000, and then I had our daughter the next year, and then we worked together a bunch. We did Zoolander together, we did Dodgeball together.”
While Christine initially wanted to “work as much as” possible after becoming a mother to Ella, her priorities quickly changed.
She said: “I didn’t want us both to be shooting and on sets and having either my mom or a babysitter or a nanny or whoever going to my kids’ things.
“It was so important to me to be hands-on in that way. So I never left the business, I never retired. I just took a step back.”
The pair announced their separation in 2017, but confirmed in 2022 that they were back together.
Christine previously said in a chat on the McBride Rewind podcast that it was the Covid-19 pandemic, and the therapy sessions she and Ben had during the lockdown, that helped them get back on track.
She revealed: “If there’s a silver lining for us during Covid, that was the little gift. We all kind of bubbled up together with our kids. Our daughter was graduating high school at the time, our son was graduation eighth grade. We all were in the house together and we had nothing but time.
“So 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. I think it’s something people don’t love to talk about because it feels like a failure.’
“By the way, 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.
‘Life moves at such a rapid pace that we don’t often take the time to just pause and say, ‘Okay, he looked at his stuff, I looked at my stuff’… long-term marriages are a lot of work.”
Christine Taylor and Ben Stiller thought romance was just a ‘rebound’
