Ben Stiller has admitted that his daughter Ella has called him out for not being around as much as he could have been during her childhood.
The Night in the Museum actor, 56, compared his relationship with his daughter to the one he shared with his own parents in a new interview.
Stiller is the son of the popular Sixties comedy double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
Speaking to Esquire, the actor recalled when his daughter Ella, now 19, called him out on his frequent absence.
"[Ella is] pretty articulate about it, and sometimes it's stuff that I don't want to hear," he revealed.
"It's hard to hear because it's me not being there in the ways that I saw my parents not being there. And I had always thought, 'Well I won't do that.'"
Stiller added that he was "trying to navigate my own desire to fulfill the hopes and dreams I had," adding: "And that doesn't feel great, but it's important to acknowledge."
He said: "What I've learned is that your kids are not keeping score on your career. It would be solipsistic to think that my kids actually care about that.
"They just want a parent who's emotionally present and supportive of them. That's probably what they want more than for me to be going off and pushing the bounds of my creativity."
The actor, 56, also has a son Quinlin, born in 2005, with his wife, the actor Christine Taylor. Stiller and Taylor starred together in the films Zoolander, Dodgeball, and Tropic Thunder.
Elsewhere in his interview, Stiller confirmed that he is back together with wife Christine Taylor five years after they called it quits.
The pair tied the knot in 2000 one year after they met and went on to appear in films including Zoolander and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.
Stiller announced in May 2017 that they had separated.
However, in a new interview, the Meet the Fockers star announced that he and Taylor had reconciled after he moved back into their family home at the beginning of the pandemic.
"Then, over the course of time, it evolved," he told Esquire. "We were separated and got back together and we're happy about that. It's been really wonderful for all of us. Unexpected, and one of the things that came out of the pandemic," he added.
