Universal Pictures' Meet the Fockers, which as of Sunday had grossed more than $208 million after only three weeks in domestic release, features an all-star cast - including Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand - but one of the film's major draws is the 39-year-old, curly-haired Ben Stiller, who has emerged as a box-office powerhouse.
For the last year, Stiller has been on a roll. Besides Meet the Fockers, the sequel to 2000's hit comedy Meet the Parents, Stiller starred in three other successful films in 2004 - DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, which raked in $114.3 million in domestic ticket sales; Starsky & Hutch, which grossed $88.2 million domestically; and Along Came Polly, which took in $88.1 million domestically. That steady box-office clout has elevated Stiller's paycheck to about $15 million per picture.
But defining Stiller's appeal isn't easy, though his co-stars seem eager to try.
Hoffman, who plays Stiller's free-spirited father in Meet the Fockers, said what impressed him about Stiller was that he wasn't looking for the laugh so much as the irony of a situation. "There's a great danger [in actors] trying to get the laugh," Hoffman said.
"If you are in a scene with him, you could not wish to be with a better foil," Hoffman said. "He will set you up. It's like basketball. He doesn't take every shot, like some basketball players we know. He'll pass you the ball because he's interested in the scene."
Owen Wilson, who has worked with Stiller on such films as The Cable Guy, The Royal Tenenbaums and Meet the Parents, and has a small role in Meet the Fockers, said audiences were introduced to Stiller's brand of humor more than a decade ago when he had a comedy show on MTV and later signed with Fox, which aired The Ben Stiller Show in the 1992-1993 TV season.
"[The Fox show] didn't have a big audience, but it developed sort of a cult following," Wilson said. "And I think he sort of built on that to where people kind of caught up with him."
Stiller doesn't rely on stand-up routines to make people laugh, Wilson said.
"He couldn't be further from a class clown or somebody who is on all the time," Wilson said. "Sometimes, that can be a little exhausting, having somebody who is always cracking jokes. That's not Ben, and that's not his brand of humor. I remember like on Starsky & Hutch, it seemed at one point the [advance audience] tracking wasn't very good." In interviews, "Ben was making jokes about that. `The comedy team that nobody wants to see!' It was like slightly black humor."
