During a Tribeca Film Festival panel, Ben Stiller talked about an interesting moment he had with the late film critic Roger Ebert.
Apparently, Ebert’s review of Stiller’s “Zoolander” in late September 2001, was pretty harsh. Well, really harsh:
“There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world. As this week’s Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer “Zoolander,” a comedy about a plot to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia because of his opposition to child labor. You might want to read that sentence twice. The logic: Child labor is necessary to the economic health of the fashion industry, and so its opponents must be eliminated.”
However, a few years late the two met when they were guests at “The Tonight Show.”
“To his credit,” Stiller says, “I ran into him like five or six years later backstage at The Tonight Show, and he said, ‘Hey, I just want to apologize to you. I wrote that about Zoolander, and I [now] think it’s really funny. Everything was a little crazy [back then]. It was Sept. 11 and I went overboard.’ I said, ‘Thanks for telling me backstage at The Tonight Show.'”
Stiller is currently working on a sequel for the popular male modeling film.
