Ben Stiller Says ‘Nepo Baby’ Is An Advantageous Marketing Term ‘Like That Brat Pack Thing’
- - Ben Stiller Says ‘Nepo Baby’ Is An Advantageous Marketing Term ‘Like That Brat Pack Thing’
Keegan KellyOctober 29, 2025 at 6:00 PM
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You’ll never catch one of the most successful second-generation celebrities in Hollywood history complaining that people on Twitter attribute his career to his parents — not when the Nepo Baby discourse is such a ticket-seller.
In 2022, New York Magazine published a cover story about a growing trend in social media that was changing the way celebrities whined about their critics. Dubbing 2022 “The Year of the Nepo Baby,” New York Magazine examined how film and TV fans on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram were becoming more and more interested in the lineages of A-list actor families, and the outlet also highlighted the bellyaching of some so-called “Nepo Babies” who believed that they weren’t taken seriously enough by the public just because they went into the family business.
Since then, the term “Nepo Baby” became something of a slur among an entire class of born-famous celebrities who had never before enjoyed the taste of some sweet, sweet victimization. However, for those artists who used their parents’ success as a launching pad for even greater and more celebrated careers, the term “Nepo Baby” doesn’t need to carry a negative connotation — in fact, it’s kind of catchy.
Prolific actor, comedian, writer and producer Ben Stiller is one such legacy A-lister, and, during a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show in which Stiller promoted his family’s documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, the Meet the Parents and Tropic Thunder star admitted that he actually finds the Nepo Baby label to be a professional advantage, seeing as the Stiller name certainly hasn’t struggled at the box office.
“I think it’s kind of like that Brat Pack thing, right?” Stiller said of the Nepo Baby moniker that he considers a “selling point” rather than a slur. “New York Magazine, they coined a phrase, and then it just became a thing.”
However, as Stiller noted, the phrase “Nepo Baby” isn’t nearly as new as the phenomenon, since kids have been following in their parents’ footsteps for millennia before social media even existed. Explained Stiller, “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 acknowledged that the recent cultural discussion about young artists leveraging their family name and connections for professional opportunities brings up “other arguments to be made about access and all those things,” but even that doesn’t paint the full picture of what growing up with celebrity parents really entails. “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,” Stiller said of his earliest experiences with show business. “The stress, the effects it has on relationships. You see that up close as a kid, and then you still wanna go into it.”
But, ultimately, the connections made the “dark underside” worth it, as Stiller credits his mother’s professional gravitas for getting him one of his first gigs. When Stiller was a young actor trying to get a role in an Off-Broadway production of the John Guare play “The House of Blue Leaves,” he says that he “couldn’t get in because the casting director didn’t want to see me.” Then, Stiller’s mother, Anne Meara, called in “a favor,” and Stiller ended up in the cast of the show’s 1987 television play.
As opposed to other famous children of famous parents, Stiller seems to be fully aware of the advantage that his upbringing gave him in his own career, and he also understands that, regardless of what Twitter critics may say, getting branded as a Nepo Baby isn’t some scarlet letter when human culture has been rewarding multigenerational arts dynasties for ages.
Between the Stillers, the Coppolas, the Fondas and the Barrymores, audiences have always loved when stars have star children — we just don’t like it when those kids whine like they’re literal babies.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
