COVID Was Their Second Chance: How Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor Found Their Way Back

Sometimes the thing that breaks the world open is exactly what two people need to fix what’s broken between them.

Christine Taylor didn’t mince words about the 2017 split from Ben Stiller. It was challenging. Heavy-hearted. The kind of decision that leaves you feeling dejected because it wasn’t supposed to go this way. But on the Tuesday, May 26 episode of The McBridge Rewind podcast, the 54-year-old actress revealed something unexpected: the pandemic became their unlikely lifeline.

“If there was a silver lining for us during COVID, that was the little gift,”Taylor explained. With nowhere to go and nowhere to be, the couple—who’d been married since 2000 and share two kids, Ella, 24, and Quinlin, 20—essentially bubbled up together. Their daughter was graduating high school. Their son was finishing eighth grade. And instead of the usual chaos of separate lives, they had“nothing but time.”They logged into Zoom therapy sessions together, worked on themselves as a unit, and gradually found their way back. By 2022, they confirmed they were officially reconciled, though they’d never really stopped being a family. They were coparenting, spending holidays together, staying connected through the noise.

What’s striking about Taylor’s candor is how honest she is about the mess of it all. They hadn’t been on the same page. They were working hard to make something fit that didn’t. Sometimes the kindest thing is to pause, not to fail. That pause lasted years, but it wasn’t empty—it was the space where healing happened.

Ben Stiller opened up about his own demons in his October 2025 documentary Stiller&Meara: Nothing Is Lost. He’d internalized his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s 61-year marriage as the gold standard, and when his own relationship fractured, he felt like he was failing at something fundamental. There was also an“aversion”to working with Taylor professionally—something Taylor herself addressed in the documentary. Their parents were frequent collaborators, and Stiller carried anxiety about what that proximity might cost a relationship. The pressure of eating, sleeping, and breathing each other on set, she noted, combined with the outside world’s scrutiny, created a weight that was“very loaded.”

What makes this story resonate isn’t just that a Hollywood couple got back together. It’s the rare vulnerability in acknowledging that sometimes separating is the right move, and sometimes finding your way back is the real work. They didn’t skip the hard part. They sat with a therapist and actually did it.