Not even Derek's Blue Steel could conceal Ben Stiller's sorrow over the box office failure that was Zoolander 2.
The actor looks back at the derided 2016 sequel in an upcoming episode of David Duchovny's new podcast Fail Better — intended to examine life's missteps and how failure molds a person — and reveals he was "blindsided" that the film wasn't a success.
"I thought everybody wanted this," Stiller, 58, said of the sequel (via PEOPLE). "And then it's like, 'Wow, I must have really f---ed this up. Everybody didn't go to it. And it's received these dreadful evaluations.' It really scared me out because I was like, 'I didn't know [it] was that bad?'"
As a consequence, he plunged into a spiral of self-doubt. "What scared me the most on that one was l'm losing what I think what's funny, the questioning yourself," he confessed. "It was certainly blindsiding to me. And it certainly impacted me for a long time."
The introspection that ensued permitted Stiller to pursue other creative endeavors. "The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said, 'Make Zoolander 3 right now,' or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that," he said.
"But I had this space to sit with myself and cope with it and other projects that I had been working on — not comedies, some of them — I have the opportunity to actually just work on and develop. Even if somebody said, 'Well, why don't you go do another comedy or do this?' I probably could have figured out something to do. But I just didn't want to."
Zoolander, which he also directed and co-wrote, starred Stiller as Derek Zoolander, a naive male model who is persuaded into murdering the prime minister of Malaysia. The cast included Owen Wilson (as Stiller's rival Hansel) and Will Ferrell (as Jacobim Mugatu, the designer behind the indoctrination). The comedy was a box office triumph, garnering $45.1 million domestically and $60.8 million worldwide against a $28 million budget.
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Stiller served as protagonist, director, and co-writer of the sequel, which saw the return of original actors Wilson and Ferrell and welcomed Penélope Cruz and Benedict Cumberbatch. The film — centered on Derek and Hansel's reunion at a fashion event in Rome, where they're propelled into a conspiracy — was largely derided by critics and failed at the box office, generating $28.8 million domestically and $56.7 million worldwide against a reported $50 million budget.
After the movie failed, Stiller said he had no inclination to do comedy.
"Why didn't you want to?" Duchovny inquired. "Was it anger?"
"It was just hurt," noted Stiller. "Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do, I always adored directing. I always enjoyed making pictures. I always, in my mind, liked the notion of just directing movies since I was a child, and not necessarily comedies. And so, over the span of like the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series."
Stiller's post-Zoolander endeavors include the miniseries Escape at Dannemora, Severance, In the Dark, and High Desert, all of which he executive produced or directed.
To hear more from Stiller's interview, log into his episode of Fail Better on May 7.
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