Ariana Grande will be owning the month of November for at least one more year.
The actress and singer, who plays Olivia Jones in the upcoming fourth installment in the Meet the Parentsfranchise, titled Focker In-Law, took to her Instagram on Friday to share that she has wrapped filming on the John Hamburg-directed comedy for Universal. The movie is set for release on Nov. 25, 2026.
“These past few months have been so, so unimaginably special. i love my Fockers, and i love my Byrnes… so, so very much i will miss this bunch terribly. see you next november !” she wrote in the post’s caption.
Grande also shared several behind-the-scenes photos from set, including her hugging Ben Stiller, who returns as Greg Focker, as well as another photo of her and Beanie Feldstein.
While most plot details remain under wraps, The Hollywood Reporterpreviously revealed that one plot point centers on the son of Stiller and Polo’s characters, who gets engaged to a ball-busting woman who seems all wrong for him. Sources also told THR that Grande will play the fiancée.
The first three films in the Meet the Parents franchise were box office hits, grossing more than $1.13 billion worldwide in total. The original 2000 film follows Stiller’s Greg Focker, who is ready to marry his girlfriend, Pam (Polo). But before he can ask the big question, he must win over her intimidating father, former CIA agent Jack Byrnes (De Niro), at Pam’s sister’s wedding.
Last November, Grande was booked and busy on the press tour for Wicked, where she stars opposite Cynthia Erivo in the Jon M. Chu-directed pic. Her performance also earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Now, she’s about to kick off promotion for the second film, Wicked: For Good, which hits theaters Nov. 21.
During a recent appearance on “The Howard Stern Show,” Ben Stiller gave his thoughts on the term “nepo baby,” which describes children of celebrity parents who become famous themselves. Stiller, who recently immortalized the life of his own famous parents in his documentary “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” said he considers the moniker more of a “selling point” than a put-down.
“I think it’s kind of like that Brat Pack thing, right? New York Magazine, they coined a phrase, and then it just became a thing,” Stiller said. “But it’s always been what it is, in humanity and life. It’s like, you buy a violin, a Stradivarius or whatever, it’s been in the family for hundreds of years. That’s a selling point.”
Stiller added that he does understand there are “other arguments to be made about access and all those things.” However, he also pointed out that when he was growing up in the industry, he also saw the less glamorous sides of Hollywood.
Stiller explained, “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 wanna go into it.”
The “Zoolander” star recalled that his first acting job was an off-Broadway production of “House of Blue Leaves.” He said he got the final call back as “a favor” from his mom after he “couldn’t get in because the casting director didn’t want to see me.”
“If you have the passion, you do it,” he added. “You go for it.”
Hosted by Jane Pauley. Featured: Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous memoir; actor Tim Curry; Ben Stiller’s documentary about his parents, Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara; children’s video entertainer Ms. Rachel; AI-generated art; a library that straddles the U.S.-Canada border; and millions march in the “No Kings” rallies.
A-List actor and director Ben Stiller knows a good story when he sees one, so he knew profiling his late parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, would be compelling. But even he had no idea how deep it would take him. “No, I didn’t!” he laughed. “I mean, I didn’t know where it was gonna go.”
Stiller & Meara had been the husband-and-wife comedy team of the 1960s and ’70s, appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 36 times. But for Ben and sister Amy, Stiller & Meara were also Mom & Dad – and that could get confusing.
Stiller’s new Apple TV documentary, “Stiller & Meara” Nothing Is Lost,” examines how his parents navigated both roles.
Ben Stiller with his parents, the comedy team of Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara,
CBS News
Married 62 years, their family life was shaped by Jerry’s relentless ambition, and Anne’s resentment doing comedy when her dream was to be a serious actress – and the drinking that followed. As Ben noted in his film, “She had to go up there and do that act, because she was so good at it. But it wasn’t really her true thing, you know? It wasn’t her true happiness.”
The film is an adult’s attempt to answer the complicated question that shaped his childhood: Where did the act end, and the marriage begin?
In one archival interview, Jerry Stiller calls his wife “the funniest woman in the world off stage and on stage. Now the thing is, when she does these funny things, I am an exploiter and opportunist, and I’ll take a pencil and I’ll start to write it down.”
Anne Meara picks up: “He says we can use that on a show, and I’m ready to kill him! Again, where does the act end and the marriage begin?”
Ben Stiller said, “There’s so much footage and material and things to show of the good and the bad and the tension and the happy times. I felt it was really important to try to have a balance in the film that would relay to the audience what the reality was of their relationship, which was, I think, grounded in love.”
From 2010: Stiller & Meara on love and marriage (“Sunday Morning”)
It wasn’t just old clips from long-ago shows that Stiller had access to. He stumbled into some unexpected help while cleaning out the family apartment to sell: Jerry Stiller had secretly taped everything, producing boxes and boxes of recordings. “I had no idea that there were these sort of arguments and discussions that he had recorded,” said Ben. “All of it, I’d never heard before. It brought me back to being a kid in the house when they were working together.”
For a filmmaker trying to figure it all out, Ben Stiller had struck gold.
Among the recordings was a conversation in which his father talks to his mother about her drinking, and confronts her about it.
I asked, “Was it important to you in terms of understanding your dad, that you could hear him do that?”
“Yeah,” said Ben. “I was like, ‘Oh, okay. He really did speak to her about it.’ Because as kids that was never anything we talked about.”
“You may be carrying around this sense of, why didn’t dad ever confront mom? Guess what – he did.”
“Right! He did,” said Ben. “And it changed.”
This deconstruction of his parents’ marriage came while Stiller was wrestling with his own mid-life issues. Separated at the time from his wife, actress Christine Taylor (with whom he later reconciled), Stiller describes himself as having felt out of balance and unhappy, disconnected from his family, and a little bit lost.
He talked about the irony of thinking he was doing so much better than his parents: “When you’re younger, you think, Okay, I’m gonna do everything better. I’m not gonna make THAT mistake. I found myself at a place in my life where things weren’t really in sync.”
Stiller & Meara now had some company under the magnifying glass: their son. “I didn’t want to pretend to be some sort of objective judge of their relationship when I had so many issues in my own relationships and my stuff,” he said,
Actor-director Ben Stiller.
CBS News
Was that a challenging journey to make himself? “Yeah,” he said. “Then it changed everything because it was like, oh, okay. I’m gonna have to, you know, talk about my own feelings! It’s stuff that I don’t really ever, you know, talk about.”
Not exactly where he expected to end up, when he started the project. In honest, raw, and revealing conversations with his daughter Ella and son Quin, Ben talked in the film about his own issues being the child of someone famous: “I remember there was this one time I literally was on the street talking to him about the fact that I felt like he didn’t pay enough attention to us, and while we were talking someone on the street came over and said, ‘Jerry, I love you work’ and he started talking [to them]!”
Stiller exposes the excruciating challenge of breaking patterns, when his son adds: “That’s hilarious, because just a few weeks ago we were all out at a restaurant and I’d been stressed about college stuff. And then the people there wanted to get a picture of you, and I remember I was so frustrated, like, the world just has to stop to get this picture.”
Stiller said, “I was genuinely surprised when he told me that. As a filmmaker I thought, This is an interesting moment in the movie.”
“As a father?” I asked.
“As a father I was like, Oh, s***,” he laughed.
Ben Stiller has done something requiring more courage than simply making an honest movie about loved ones; he’s made an honest movie about himself.
I said, “One of the most uncomfortable places you can ever be is the mirror, right? Sometimes your kids are holding up the mirror.”
“Yeah, you know, it’s kind of like … it is a bummer, ’cause I’m never gonna get to go back, you know?” Stiller said.
And that’s helped him round the edges from his own childhood – finding the grace to give his parents by understanding he might need to seek some of his own.
Asked where he stands in his relationship to his parents, Stiller replied, “I don’t know!”
“All this work, and you don’t know?”
“Well, I mean, they’re still not here. That was the sad thing for me about finishing the movie. It was like, Oh, now I don’t have an excuse to kind of just be connecting with them here.“
I asked, “This was an intense reconnection when it sounds like you needed it the most?”
“Yeah,” said Stiller. “Like my mom probably would have said, like, ‘Yeah, go make a movie about it if you wanna figure out how to process your feelings!’”
To watch a trailer for “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” click on the video player below:
In this web exclusive actor-director Ben Stiller talks with Jim Axelrod about his Apple TV documentary about his parents, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” and about how making the film became a reflection not just on their lives but on his own.
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were a beloved comedy team – and the parents of actor-director Ben Stiller. After the deaths of his mother and father, Stiller sought to pay tribute as few sons could: a documentary about their lives on-stage and off. But even he didn’t anticipate to what depths his film, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” would go. Stiller talks with Jim Axelrod about how examining the lives of two comedy greats led to re-examining his own.
After their collaboration on Nutcrackers, Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films and Rivulet Films will re-team for the pickleball comedy The Dink.
Jake Johnson has nabbed the leading role as he plays a washed-up tennis pro who, to save a club in crisis and win his father’s respect, does the one thing he swore he’d never do: play pickleball. The cast includes Mary Steenburgen and Ed Harris, while Stiller and former tennis champion Andy Roddick will have key supporting roles.
Johnson is coming off Self Reliance, his feature length directorial debut that he also wrote and stars in. Josh Greenbaum will direct The Dink from an original screenplay from Sean Clements, with production to start in Los Angeles in November.
John Lesher and Stiller are producing through their Red Hour Films banner, alongside Rivulet’s Rob Paris and Mike Witherill. Johnson will also produce. Stiller and Rivulet Films most recently worked together on David Gordon Green’s Nutcrackers, which opened the Toronto Film Festival and was picked up by Hulu.
Nutcrackers marked Stiller’s first starring role in a movie since Mike White’s Brad’s Status and Noah Baumbach’s Netflix family drama The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017, as the Hollywood veteran has focused on directing and producing in recent years.
Rivulet is financing The Dink, with Rick Steele, Clements and Greenbaum executive producing.
Johnson is repped by UTA, while Stiller by repped by WME. Steenburgen by repped by UTA and Entertainment 360, and Harris is repped by CAA, and Greenbaum is repped by UTA and Entertainment 360. Clements is repped by by UTA.
