Ben Stiller reflects on separation from his wife Christine Taylor before repairing their marriage

(CNN) — Ben Stiller and his wife, actress Christine Taylor, are known to be one of Hollywood’s longest and happiest marriages, but that has not always been the case.

In an interview with the New York Times, Stiller was asked about he and Taylor, who married in 2000, having split for a bit.

Stiller told the publication that when his film “Zoolander 2” came out in 2016, their marriage “wasn’t in a great place.”

He was asked about Taylor’s appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” where she discussed “separation and reconciliation being a result of what she called adult ‘growth spurts.’”

“When we separated, it was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship, how much I loved our family unit,” he told the Times. “It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected. In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together. I don’t know where Christine was, you’d have to ask her, but Covid put us all together in the same house.”

According to Stiller, “It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together.”

“But I’m so grateful for it, and I think not that many people do come back together when they separate,” he said. “There’s nothing like that, when you come back. You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.”

The couple share a daughter and a son, Ella and Quinlin.

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