Christine Taylor says she and Ben Stiller found their way back together during COVID after their 2017 separation, and she is now describing the split as one of the hardest decisions of her life. Speaking May 26 on Josh McBride's The McBride Rewind podcast, Taylor said the couple's reunion came after years of trying to make their marriage work and then stepping back when they could not.
For readers searching Ben Stiller now, the reason is Taylor's new account of how a marriage that began in 2000 and lasted 17 years did not simply break and stay broken. She said they met when she was 28, married on May 13, 2000, in Kauai, Hawaii, and later separated in 2017 after realizing they were not on the same page about a lot of things. That split, she said, felt heavy and challenging even as the pair kept in contact and continued co-parenting their two children, Ella and Quinlin.
The timing matters because Taylor tied the reunion to the same months when the family was forced into the same home life by the pandemic. Ella, now 24, was graduating high school and Quinlin, now 20, was finishing eighth grade while Taylor and Stiller were on Zoom with a therapist. She said the work of staying connected during quarantine gave them a way back to one another, and she added that if there was a silver lining in COVID, that was it.
The reconciliation was not presented as easy or neat. Taylor said the separation was not light and came with a heavy heart, and she acknowledged that at the time she felt dejected, as if the marriage should have been something they could have worked out. That is the friction running through her account: the couple kept parenting, kept talking and even kept spending time together as a family, but the decision to pause the relationship still came only after they had worked so hard to make it fit and make it right.
There is no new joint project attached to Taylor's comments, and the source does not explain what ultimately caused the split in the first place. What her account does settle is that the marriage's second act began during COVID, not in a formal announcement or public reunion, but in the slower work of therapy, co-parenting and time together. For now, that is the unanswered edge of the story: the reasons for the 2017 break remain private, even as Taylor has made clear that the couple found their way back.
Ben Stiller, Nicholas Galitzine and Bella Maclean join Netflix film A Matter of Time.
