My interview with Ben Stiller: the dervish unwinds

"Stiller has a reputation for being a sombre interview: “intense bloke” reported back one Australian. Onscreen, he is an uptight dervish, scuttling from one humiliation to the next, shoulder hunched, brow scrunched, a man betrayed by his own body, a troglodyte under siege from his own treacherous Id. In person he resembles Ben Stiller’s calmer, better-looking older brother. Dressed in khaki pants, blue t-shirt, sneakers, his hair longish with wolfish grey streaks, he has the slightly matte affectlessness of the off-duty comedian, speaking in gentle, mild sentences from which extreme judgments have been carefully excised, as if the wildness of his comedy had purged him of the need for lesser extremities. Collaborators all tell you the same thing: Stiller is patient, meticulous, detail-oriented." — The Guardian