Why Ben Stiller won’t be directing on ‘Severance’ Season 3

Ben Stiller’s phone is buzzing. Each time someone sends a text, it alerts him with the sound of Roy Scheider’s police chief, Brody, telling Robert Shaw’s Quint that his vessel, the Orca, is not of sufficient size to deal with the 25-foot great white shark he just saw popping out of the Atlantic.

Stiller apologizes and silences his phone, which continues to vibrate busily on the table.

When we first met in early June, Stiller was in the thick of writing and prepping the next season of “Severance,” the sci-fi drama that led all TV series with 27 Emmy nominations this year. He was also putting the finishing touches on a documentary about his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. And in a few minutes, he’d be driving over to Rob Reiner’s house to shoot an interview about “This Is Spinal Tap.” (“Still so friggin’ funny,” Stiller says.) Any one of these things would be enough to repeatedly summon the voice of Chief Brody.

But as the flurry is arriving the day after the New York Knicks fired head coach Tom Thibodeau, and as Stiller sits alongside Spike Lee and Timothée Chalamet in the firmament of celebrity New York Knicks fandom, this is probably about Coach Thibs.

“These things take time to come together,” Stiller says of the numerous ambitious projects he has in the pipeline. “And the older you get, the more you realize that you only have so much time.”

(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)

“Being a Knicks fan is probably overshadowing the rest of my career — which might be a good thing,” Stiller jokes. He shakes his head. “It’s like an addiction.”

Stiller was just at Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals in Indianapolis when the Pacers eliminated the Knicks. He’s still depressed. Seriously. It’s like a bad breakup. Where there was once joy, there is now only pain and absence. It’s over, and the bill has come due.

Stiller and his 20-year-old son, Quinlin, really got into watching the games this season, years after Quinlin tapped out because being a Knicks fan is hard, what with the team’s legacy of failure and heartbreak. Stiller’s wife, Christine Taylor, became equally invested. They went through the highs and lows together, which helps, Stiller says. If something is going to take over your life, you might as well make it a family affair.

“If we’re working, you always know it’s game day because Ben and John Turturro will be gathered around a phone in between takes,” “Severance” star Adam Scott tells me. “It’s deeply important. I’m actually envious of their passion.”

What if the Knicks had beaten the Pacers? Would we even be sitting here in L.A. talking right now, I ask. Wouldn’t you be at home watching the finals?

“There was a window,” Stiller says. “I would have been OK.” He starts laughing and tells me about a meeting he recently had at Netflix that coincided with one of the Knicks’ playoff games. It was one of those sit-downs where you, the talent, talk about your dream projects and what you’ve got cooking and see if there’s maybe mutual interest.

“It was hard to concentrate,” Stiller recalls. “Luckily, they understood because they’re also fans. They got it.” He pauses. “But I think I’m going to be working at Apple because of that meeting. I was so distracted.” He laughs long and hard at the memory.

Stiller’s parents, comedy duo Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, are the subject of his upcoming documentary “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.”

(Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection via Getty)

At this point, you might consider staging an intervention, save for the fact that Stiller is one of the most together human beings you’ll ever meet. When we reconnected earlier this month, he’d finished the doc about his parents, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” (arriving in October), was prepping a World War II survival feature film he’ll be shooting in the spring and was just about to start the next “Meet the Parents” movie, “Focker-in-Law.” He was also still burrowing into “Severance” Season 3, though, for the first time, he won’t be directing any episodes because he’ll be making the war movie.

“I’m at the point in my life where I’m like, ‘The clock is ticking,’” Stiller says. And, OK, we’re actually talking about whether he’ll be alive to see the Knicks win another championship — it has been more than 50 years — but the point remains valid. He’s going to turn 60 in November. It’s a daunting milestone.

“Sixty sounds old. It’s hard to get around it,” Stiller says. “And of course, it’s that other thing of, like, you know what the next one is.” He laughs. “‘Oh, s—.’”

So, no, there are no firm plans to mark the occasion come November, though Taylor has asked. Stiller has never been one to celebrate birthdays anyway, preferring to use the occasion to take a little stock. He tells me he thinks about listening to an Elton John album, say “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,” and realizing it came out 50 years ago. And if you asked someone in 1975 about music in 1925, would they be able to say, “Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five were far out, man”? Because that’s how they talked half a century ago. Time marches on. You can’t escape it. When Stiller shoots “Focker-in-Law,” he’ll be older than Robert De Niro was when they made “Meet the Parents.”

Stiller, right, is now older than Robert De Niro, left, was when they faced off in the 2000 movie “Meet the Parents.” Stiller is set to star in the forthcoming sequel “Focker-in-Law.”

(Phillip V. Caruso / Universal Pictures)

Which prompts Stiller, ever the pragmatist, to think, “Time is valuable.” That’s why he and “Severance” showrunner Dan Erickson and the writing team have been spending much of the year planning Season 3 so that Stiller can step away and direct this feature film that tells the true story of a downed airman in occupied France and how he got involved with the French Resistance. Stiller also wants to make a movie based on the Rachel Maddow podcast “Bag Man,” detailing the bribery scandal surrounding Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president.

“These things take time to come together,” Stiller says, “and the older you get, the more you realize that you only have so much time.”

Making the documentary about his parents, an idea that crystallized after his father died in 2020, reinforced that belief. Stiller & Meara were a hugely popular comedy team in the 1960s before going their separate ways professionally in the 1970s. Married from 1954 until Meara’s death in 2015, they balanced their creative impulses with a commitment to their marriage and two children. (Stiller has an older sister, Amy.) It wasn’t always easy, and the documentary explores the challenges they met to stay together, pressures that Stiller eventually faced too as a husband and father.

“My parents’ marriage really did affect me in terms of how I thought about our relationship,” says Stiller. He and Taylor separated in 2017 but moved back in together during the pandemic, eventually reconciling. Stiller wasn’t planning on talking about his own marriage in the doc, but the parallels made it unavoidable, particularly as both of Stiller and Taylor’s children — Ella and Quinlin — have gone into acting as well.

(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)

Jerry Stiller was protective of his son’s showbiz ambitions, so much so that if a critic gave Ben a bad review, Jerry would sit down and fire off a letter. Or if Ben was up for a job, Jerry would put in a call on his behalf. When Stiller was attending UCLA, he applied for an internship with Alan Thicke’s late-night talk show, “Thicke of the Night.” And Jerry called the producer, telling him he’d be making a big mistake if he didn’t hire his son.

“It would drive me crazy,” Stiller says. “He was the most loving dad, but some of that stuff is just a rite of passage you have to go through yourself. I remember the first play I was ever in, ‘The House of Blue Leaves,’ and John Simon with New York Magazine panned me and Christopher Walken in one sentence. And I thought that was pretty cool because I knew Christopher Walken was amazing.”

Stiller doesn’t believe he’s an overprotective dad. Am I going to be hearing from your kids to the contrary, I ask.

“Or from Jerry Stiller in the Great Beyond?” Stiller continues, finishing the thought with a laugh. “I don’t think so.”

His daughter, Ella, just made her off-Broadway debut in “Dilaria,” a dark comedy about the destructive relationship between two young women obsessed with social media. Watching her onstage was a little surreal, Stiller says, for many reasons, not the least of which being the play’s explicit language and themes. But seeing his daughter so thoroughly enjoy herself and having the feeling that she was really capable (“I knew I was in good hands”) filled him with a joy he imagines his parents felt early in his career.

Of all the things Stiller has going now, he might be most nervous about the “Focker” movie, only because he hasn’t acted much the last several years and realizes that it’s challenging to make a sequel that stands as its own story. Years ago, he talked about his Mt. Rushmore of actors — De Niro was on it, of course, along with Gene Hackman, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. Pacino is the only one he hasn’t worked with, though he came close, reading for “Author! Author!” with Pacino at the Regency Hotel when he was 15 years old.

Stiller did have dinner with Pacino recently. He thinks this may sound weird, but he found Pacino to be a lot like his dad.

“They have the same warmth and generosity and love of the theater,” Stiller says, smiling. “And when he talks about actors and their work, he’s so openhearted about it.”

We both love Pacino’s memoir, “Sonny Boy,” and we talk about how much we enjoyed listening to his off-the-cuff reading of it on the audiobook.

“Just the best,” Stiller says. “It made for such good company. I’d love to work with him.”

He is a big fan of “Severance.” Might Pacino show up at Lumon Industries someday?

“That’s not the first time that’s been spoken of,” Stiller says.

New employee?

“New department,” Stiller answers. We look at each other, waiting to see who blinks first. “I mean, you never know.”

(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)