Something about Ben...

It's not hard to pinpoint why Ben Stiller is possibly the most bankable comedian in Hollywood. Since winning our sympathies as the infatuated Ted in the Farrelly Brothers' 1998 gross-out comedy

Dressed in jeans and a crease-free black shirt, 38-year-old Stiller walks through the door of his suite in a plush Beverly Hills hotel radiating movie-star self-assurance, and immediately quashing all thoughts that he's as neurotic as the characters he plays. 'I think people tend to put you in boxes, like, he's the highly-strung guy,' he says. 'It's simplifying it. I personally don't see myself as being that type.'

For the son of two comedians - Ed Sullivan Show regulars Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara --Stiller comes across like he was adopted. A very earnest funnyman, he doesn't arrive armed with a barrel-load of one-liners, impersonations or silly walks - it's as if he's reserving his energies for the screen. 'Ben's not about hearing what you're saying, then thinking of the next joke,' confirms his wife of four years, actress Christine Taylor, who is sitting in on our interview.

He and Christine are parents to twoyearold Ella. 'Fatherhood,' enthuses Stiller, 'is going great.' But then he qualifies it. 'Well, you'd have to ask my daughter. I'm enjoying it, especially the past few months. If you have a kid, I think you understand that it is this indescribable, incredible feeling you have for your child. You don't understand until you have kids, then you look at your own parents in such a different way.'

Given a Super 8 camera by his father when he was 10, Stiller harboured ambitions to be a serious director for a while. 'I think I was rebelling against my parents, the comedians,' he remembers. 'As my parents were in the business, it took me a while to figure out what I liked doing for myself.' Even now, it's not clear if Stiller knows what he wants. Caught in the eternal dilemma faced by every intelligent comic actor from Woody Allen on down, he has yearned for serious fare ever since he began his career acting on stage in John Guare's play House Of Blue Leaves. After a short-lived stint with sketch show Saturday Night Live, and then to MTV to make the Emmy-winning Ben Stiller Show, he initially began the transition to Hollywood as a director, with the 1994 Gen-X drama Reality Bites, in which he co-starred with Winona Ryder.

After the relative failure of his follow-up, the black Jim Carrey comedy The Cable Guy, he lucked out with the Farrellys and a comic star was born. Yet, despite playing a philandering husband in Your Friends & Neighbours and junkie screenwriter Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight, dramas were hard to come by. Stiller has had to satisfy himself with esoteric comedies like The Royal Tenenbaums. But it's always been his farcical work - principally, as the luckless suitor in Meet The Parents - that reels 'em in.

And this year Stiller has been giving them plenty. He's just wrapped Meet The Fockers, the sequel to Meet The Parents. And after romancing Jennifer Aniston in Along Came Polly and playing a bouffant Starsky to Owen Wilson's louche Hutch, he has hit the jackpot for the third time with Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, which took Stiller's US box-office grosses for 2004 to a staggering $285 million.

Even dreadful reviews for the execrable Jack Black comedy Envy (out next month) seem not to have tarnished his Midas touch. If he's bothered that his success stems from comedies, he doesn't show it. 'I would personally like to branch out and do other things,' he admits. 'But I'm not putting any pressure on myself. I almost made a conscious decision that I wasn't going to make a conscious decision about having to do serious roles.'

As Dodgeball's 'ridiculously self-involved gym rat' White Goodman, who takes on rival gym owner Vince Vaughn's bunch of no-hopers in the titular contact sport, Stiller is as broad as he's been since playing the dopey male model in Zoolander, his third feature film as director. One look at Stiller's purple spandex, Village People moustache and power mullet and you can't help but smirk. 'He's a certain sort of person that exists - all liposuction, implant surgery --everything is artificial within,' says Stiller.

'I don't think going to the gym and comedy go that well together. You know what I mean? You can't be that self-involved and be funny too.'

Written and directed by newcomer Rawson Thurber, Dodgeball is the first solo production of Stiller's company Red Hour Films. It also marks Stiller's first outing on screen with his wife since they appeared together in Zoolander in