Why Ben Stiller’s worst-ever movie remains the “favourite experience” of his career
There’s a kind of achievement in managing to make a movie that scores 0% on Rotten Tomatoes; fewer than 50 movies in history have the honour, and you would imagine that for the majority of those involved in making them, they’d rather forget the whole thing.
But not so Ben Stiller, whose own entry in the hall of shame happens to be one of his favourites.
Rubbing shoulders alongside the likes of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, Highlander 2: The Quickening and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 is Stiller’s 1988 effort Fresh Horses, a movie which featured the de facto ‘80s comedy leading lady of choice in Molly Ringwald and Viggo Mortensen, no less in a movie with a plot that is… interesting to say the least.
In it, a college student is about to marry a wealthy woman when he falls in love with a girl from Kentucky instead, who claims she is 20, but later turns out to be 16…and already married. So yeah, there’s that. As if all of it weren’t problematic enough, it absolutely tanked at the box office, a result of audiences thinking that seeing Ringwald on screen meant it would be a light and fluffy affair, and her reported salary, which ate up a million dollars before they’d even started.
The combination of Ringwald and her Pretty in Pink co-star Andrew McCarthy, who was also a veteran of the mid-80s movies everyone loved so much, including St Elmo’s Fire, Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie’s, could do nothing to prevent the disaster, which was seemingly only loved by one man: Ben Stiller.
Stiller, who had auditioned unsuccessfully for the Marty McFly role in Back to the Future, was taking bit parts in movies and working as a writer on Saturday Night Live when the call came to be in Fresh Horses, and given the calibre of the other lead roles involved, it was perhaps understandable that the youngster was quite excited.
He told the Prof G podcast: “I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m going to be in the Brat Pack. I’m going to be in the movies, just this is it. This is my moment.’ The movie just tanked, but it was, literally to this day, my favourite experience ever making a movie.”
Fortunately for Stiller, the movie’s fate had no bearing on his own rise to fame, and although being the son of a successful actor and comedian didn’t do him any harm, he still produced his own hit comedy show before he landed directing gigs and did a fine job helming ‘90s movies, including Reality Bites and Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy.
Most recently, Stiller has put together a moving documentary about his parents called Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, which tells the story of how his father, Jerry Stiller and mother, Anne Meara, navigated a marriage with showbiz as the backdrop, both working actors throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s with children to manage too.
Arriving on Apple TV+ from this week, it begins with Ben and his sister Amy, also an actor who has appeared in the likes of Dodgeball with her brother, clearing out their father’s house after his death in 2020 at the age of 92 and proves to be an eye-opening experience for the siblings, revealing plenty not just about their parents but for them too.
