Ben Stiller thinks Nepo Babies are just the new Brat Pack.
While talking on “The Howard Stern Show,” the actor and director was asked about the surge of Nepo Babies in the industry and the subsequent flak they get. Stiller thinks that while the term might be new, the concept has been around for a while – and is often a part of the appeal.
“I think it’s kind of like that Brat Pack thing,” Stiller said. “New York Magazine, they coined a phrase and then it just became a thing, but it’s always been what it is in humanity and life. It’s like, you know, you buy a violin, a Stradivarius. It’s been in the family for hundreds of years. That’s a selling point.”
He continued: “But I also understand there are other arguments to be made about access and all those things. My feeling is, and that’s kind of like in a way what the movie is — if it’s in your blood, if it’s your passion and you grew up around it. For me, I think growing up around it, we’re talking about all these things that I saw with my parents – you actually as a kid see the dark underside of it, the stress, the effects it has on relationships. You see that up close as a kid and then you still want to go into it.”
Stiller himself is a Nepo Baby and was on Stern’s show promoting his new Apple TV documentary about his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. He also talked on his own struggles raising children who grew into the industry and how he tried to improve on how he was raised in the environment – but didn’t always succeed.
“Having kids who are now actors also and experiencing that, that became part of the movie too, in terms of talking to them about how cyclically, generationally these things get handed down,” Stiller said on “The View.”
He added: “You want to do better than your parents, but then in some places you do better, sometimes you do worse. It’s that struggle we all go through.”
“Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” is streaming now on Apple TV.
