by Paul Fischer

It would be an understatement to say that this is quite the busy year for Ben Stiller. So far, we've talked to him about Along Came Polly and Starsky and Hutch, and later in the year are Envy and Meet the Fockers. But if Stiller feels overexposed in any way, he is not prepared to admit it. "We want to get Fockers in by the end of this year so that I can have five movies come out this year, so we're hoping," laughs Stiller. He does seem somewhat concerned that by year's end the public may have grown tired of seeing a Ben Stiller film. "That would be horrible, yes, Jesus. Why didn't I think of that? Unfortunately, I can't control when they release the movies. I've done these movies over the last couple of years and you just do what you find funny. Hopefully, people will come if they want to come. But I have an awareness of not wanting to do too much, but I have to just go with my gut of what I think is worth doing."

One such film that he found funny was Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, by a first-time writer/director, in which Stiller shines as an over-obsessive fitness guru who owns a major gym, determined to take over a struggling competitor, owned by Vince Vaughan. Easily the most comically unsympathetic character in Stiller's recent arsenal, the actor laughs when asked if there
are any parallels between actor and character. "I mean, look, they're all elements of yourself somewhere." He differentiates his White Goodman character from its recent predecessors, he says laughingly, "by starting with the moustache and then going to the wig and skin colour. He had this kind of tone of orange that doesn't really exist in nature, that fake sort of skin, that tan machine, tan lotion thing. It's just trying to somehow connect with some sort of ridiculous, self-made kind of fitness guru thing that I think exists out there." Stiller says that the character isn't based on any one particular person. "There are people and elements over the years, from which I borrowed, including characters on The Ben Stiller Show sketch show, where we did a Tony Robbins take off, or that fitness guy Tony Little. I just tried to come up with something that feels like what the character is, based on what [writer/director] Rawson wrote."

For those unfamiliar with this distinctively American childhood game, dodgeball involves throwing balls at your opponents to hit them. It is an aggressive, fast and wild sport, one which Stiller did play as a kid, and, as exemplified in the movie, was one of the more aggressive participants in the sport. "I had a lot of anger and rage, but I was not very physically daunting, so I think that worked for me. But I was an awkward sort of adolescent and not as coordinated as I wanted to be. I was not the worst but I definitely wasn't the best, so I was probably closer to the backend of the middle."

It was Stiller's sense of awkwardness that may have led him, on a subconscious level, to the world of comedy. "I think comedy comes, on some level, from having a sense of humour about life and seeing life in a way where you have to have some sort of perspective on it. People that don't
have any sort of insecurities, I think, tend to be less funny. I think humour somewhat comes from the fact that you can see how ridiculous everything is and how we're all sort of just trying. I know I find those people funnier to me, those who can see the ridiculousness in life. Confident people seem to be less funny and seem to have less irony about them."