For love of art, Stiller gives face time to gags

Ben Stiller, America’s current go-to guy for enduring exquisitely comic cinematic torture, suffers for his art.

In films such as “There’s Something About Mary,” “Flirting With Disaster” and “Meet the Parents,” he underwent some of recent film’s most abject humiliations. In his latest release, “Along Came Polly,” playing nebbishy insurance actuary Reuben Feffer, Stiller scored a couple of love scenes with Jennifer Aniston, who plays a free spirit who semi-rousts Reuben from his psychic torpor.

But, predictably enough, all he can discuss, with queasy incredulity, is the scene — no doubt you’ve seen it in commercials — in which his face becomes even more intimately acquainted with a fat guy’s sweaty, hairy gut and chest.

“Honestly, that was not fun,” groans Stiller, who this day is suffering less amusingly, sniffling and coughing his way through a holiday-season cold. “It’s one of those things where, yeah, you’re doing a movie, but for me, it’s real — like, I can’t get past the fact that this is actually a real experience for me. It was really rough.”

Writer-director John Hamburg (who co-wrote Stiller’s previous films “Meet the Parents” and “Zoolander”) shot no fewer than a dozen takes of that scene. Meaning Stiller absorbed a lot of face time with said moist and hirsute paunch.

“He used the last take, and if you look at all the takes, that’s the one where it got the most traction, or whatever,” Stiller says. “I trust John — we’re friends, and he wouldn’t keep making me do it. At least, that’s what he said.”

“Do I just like to make up ways to torture Ben?” Hamburg asks rhetorically. “When you do a shot like that, it needs to be just right. That shot is as important in its own way as any in `Cold Mountain.’ The audience goes nuts. That’s one of the things as a comedy director that you pray for, and it says everything about Ben Stiller. As disgusting as it was, he knew we had to get it right. He hates it, but he loves it at the same time.”

Well, given how often he has been the victim of gross-out gags, he may not quite have loved it. “I’ve gone down that road a lot, so I’m not really looking to go in that direction as much,” he admits. “Even this script, for me, those scenes were like, `Do we really have to go and do that?’ But John said, `This is how I see the movie; I think it’ll be really funny.’ But there’s a fine line to that stuff sometimes — you can go for it and it doesn’t work. I did have that discussion with him, but because it was him and I trust him, I was willing to do it.”

“Ben is the audience,” Hamburg notes. “He looks like the guy you went to high school with or had over for Thanksgiving dinner. He has the relatability and vulnerability of the great film comedians. He has this quality where as much as he gets hit, he keeps coming back. He has these sadly funny things happen to him, but in the back of your mind, you know he’s going to be OK.”

Stiller straddles a rarefied position in movies: He has starred in a couple of the biggest recent comedy hits, but in films he directs, he aspires to a smarter, edgier sensibility that doesn’t translate into huge box-office numbers. “Zoolander,” for example, which Stiller directed and starred in as a vapid male model, opened too soon after Sept. 11, 2001, for audiences to embrace its humor upon its release, but has found a significant cult fan base on video.

“I’d rather have that kind of movie where it has its really loyal fans because the people who like it really get it, and I enjoy doing that kind of work because at the end of the day, movies that appeal to everybody in the world aren’t necessarily the best or the funniest,” Stiller says.

“Just because it appeals to the masses doesn’t mean it’s the best. So you just have to do your thing and mix it up a bit. As an actor, I feel more freedom to do that [broad material], but if I’m a director, it’s going to be closer to my sensibility,” he says.

Hamburg agrees with Stiller’s assessment of his film work. “There’s a division,” he says. “`Meet the Parents’ hits everybody, everyone can relate to that experience. Ben is an Everyman, but has a lot of different aspects to his comedy. `Zoolander’ may not connect with as many people, but more people are more fervent about that film. `Zoolander’ gets quoted more than `Meet the Parents’ — people see him and do Blue Steel (Stiller’s character’s ridiculously vacant model’s expression). I know, for Ben, he’s more satisfied with things that don’t hit in as big a way but that people discover.”

Fans will get to see a potpourri of both Stillers in the coming months — he has five movies coming out between now and the summer, including his postmodern take on the ’70s cop show “Starsky and Hutch” (in which he stars with “Zoolander” co-star Owen Wilson), the DreamWorks animated film “Madagascar,” Barry Levinson’s dark comedy “Envy” and something known at this point simply as “The Untitled Dodgeball Project.” Add to that the recent DVD release of “The Ben Stiller Show,” Stiller’s Emmy-winning but short-lived Fox sketch-comedy series (“I’ve literally been calling them up about releasing the show on DVD for the past seven years, and it just finally happened,” he says with a shrug) and the guy is facing some potentially serious overexposure.

Next up after “Polly” is “Starsky and Hutch,” which Stiller insists — for a little while, at least — is not a spoof. “I loved the show when I was a kid, I was right in the target demographic,” he says. “That’s why I wanted to do the movie — it would be so much fun to do a version of the show that somehow would not be spoofing it, really. It’s a comedy, and I didn’t want it to be a spoof version. It’s hard to describe what the tone of it is.”

Stiller opts to describe the film in a meta fashion — it could’ve been the original pilot for the show, before the series was recast with Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. “We’re playing it very straight and real,” he insists. “I was inspired by Paul Michael Glaser, I just thought he was the coolest guy ever and enjoyed getting into the vibe of the show. I tried to go for a version of that kind of guy, but there’s another layer to it, since it’s Owen and myself, who really aren’t those type of guys.

“It’s kind of straight,” he again tries, before finally admitting, “It’s probably more comedic than I want to admit. In my mind, it’s a real cop movie.” He laughs. “The closest I’ll get to that kind of cop movie.”

Will there even be a month this year where Stiller doesn’t have a movie?

“I hope to God there is,” he sighs. “This year, I’m kind of resigned to the fact that all these movies I did will be coming out. Hopefully, they’ll be spaced out enough. You know, you make movies and the studios decide when they’re going to come out. The good thing from my point of view is, they’re all kind of different and the characters are very different.”