Christine Taylor Recalls Feeling ‘Dejected’ Amid Ben Stiller Split: ‘We Should Have Been Able to Work It Out’

Christine Taylor and Ben Stiller announced their separation in 2017 — and now she’s speaking openly about the unexpected path that brought them back together.

During the Tuesday, May 26 episode of the McBride Rewind podcast, Taylor, 54, reflected on the difficult decision to step away from her marriage and how it upended her expectations.

“It was not light. It was not without a heavy heart and feeling really, even, dejected at the time,” she said, adding that the split felt like a personal defeat. “This is not how I imagined it was going to be and we should have been able to work it out.”

Taylor and Stiller, 60, met in 1999 and wed the following year.

Over the course of the conversation, Taylor, who starred alongside Stiller in films including Zoolander and Dodgeball, called that period of their relationship “challenging” but emphasized that the couple never truly disconnected.

“Through it all, we were always in contact. We were coparenting together. We were spending time together as a family,” she said on the podcast.

Everything shifted when the pandemic forced the family — which includes daughter Ella, 24, and son Quinlin, 20 — back together. The Search Party alum recalled that everyone was under one roof and they “had nothing but time.”

She described it as a “silver lining,” explaining that being “bubbled up together” gave her and the Tropic Thunder star the time and space they had been missing.

That proximity led the pair to seek professional help to improve their marriage. “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,” she shared on the podcast.

During the chat, Taylor touched on her reconciliation with Stiller when she said they are “really stronger and better than ever.”

The Brady Bunch Movie actress also acknowledged the stigma that often surrounds marital separations, noting that it’s something “people don’t love to talk about because it feels like a failure.”

Still, she pushed back on that idea, pointing out that taking a step back allowed both of them to do the necessary individual work. “Long-term marriages are a lot of work,” she said.