Twenty-five years after Zoolander, Christine Taylor still remembers having tea with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson on the set of Hansel’s apartment. One moment they were “normal Ben and Owen,” she recalled. A beat later they were Derek and Hansel, two male models trying to get her to loosen up.
Taylor shared the memory with PEOPLE on November 2 at Joe’s Pub in New York. She had a comedy role of her own that night, playing Chrissy Snow in a staged reading that launched the Three’s Company 50th anniversary tour. The event benefited the John Ritter Foundation.
Taylor and Stiller met on the 1999 TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack and married in May 2000. She already knew what it was like to take direction from him, but Zoolander was her first feature with Stiller both directing her and playing her scene partner. “It was truly a master class for me,” she said.
Stiller had a more practical reason to be glad she was there. In a November 2001 interview, he said directing a movie was so consuming that working with Taylor gave them a way to spend their first year of marriage together.
Taylor Played the Straight Role Opposite Derek and Hansel
Taylor plays Matilda Jeffries, a journalist trying to stop a fashion designer from using Derek to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia. When she and Derek take refuge at Hansel’s loft, the models want to know why she dislikes their profession. Matilda describes being in seventh grade and comparing herself to the women in her mother’s copies of Vogue and Glamour. When she tells them she was bulimic, Derek asks if she can read minds.
Taylor had to play that confession straight. In Vanity Fair’s 2021 oral history, she explained that Stiller wanted someone outside the modeling world whose reactions the audience could share. She also remembered watching him keep track of camera positions and angles while performing, then step away from the scene to check his work as director.
The group-sex montage that follows the tea required changes before release. Taylor recalled that the filmmakers shortened the sequence and showed fewer participants. Stiller also pointed out to the ratings board that his own wife was in it. After five recuts, he won a PG-13 rating on appeal, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Why Taylor Almost Left Matilda to Someone Else
Taylor had auditioned to play Pam opposite Stiller in Meet the Parents and lost the part. On The Drew Barrymore Show in March 2023, she said she initially took herself out of the running for Matilda to spare them another awkward conversation at home.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Kate Hudson were among the actresses offered the role. When those offers didn’t work out, Stiller called Taylor. Paramount already liked her from The Brady Bunch Movie, she recalled in Esquire’s 2021 oral history. Her joking description of how she landed the job, repeated to Barrymore, was that she was “fourth choice and cheap.”
Playing Matilda also meant working with her father-in-law, Jerry Stiller, as Derek’s agent, Maury Ballstein. Her husband had considered playing both Derek and Maury himself. Taylor recalled that when Jerry had to look her over and deliver a line about what a push-up bra could do for her, neither of them could stop laughing.
Derek and Hansel Got a Second Runway in Paris
Zoolander opened on September 28, 2001, just 17 days after the September 11 attacks. It took in about $15 million during its first weekend. Looking back in the Esquire interview, Taylor recalled how difficult it had been to release a broad comedy when audiences weren’t ready to laugh.
In March 2015, Stiller and Wilson took Derek and Hansel to Paris Fashion Week to close Valentino’s show ahead of the sequel. Backstage, Vogue filmed Anna Wintour asking the two models about their walks.
Derek explained that he usually started on his right foot but would lead with his left in honor of the sun’s rotation. Hansel proposed hovering to reduce his environmental footprint. Should that fail, he had a backup plan: an “organic farm-to-table walk.”