By Gill Pringle
“No, Derek does not get any smarter,” Ben Stiller smiles. “There’s no character arc for Derek.” Created for The VH1 Fashion Awards in the mid-nineties by Stiller and Drake Sather, and then showcased in the 2001 feature film, Zoolander, Derek Zoolander (a perfectly pitched comic performance from Stiller) is a typical male model: gorgeous, self-obsessed, and completely stupid. And now he’s back in Zoolander 2. After thwarting an evil plan to rock the fashion industry in the first film, Derek hits the skids at the beginning of the sequel: The Derek Zoolander Centre For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Want To Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too collapses due to poor building materials; his male model frenemy, Hansel (Owen Wilson), is injured in the disaster and scarred so badly that he’s forced out of the clotheshorse business; Derek’s girlfriend, Matilda (Stiller’s real life wife, Christine Taylor), is crushed by falling books in the collapse; and Derek loses custody of his son, Derek Jr., because he’s, well, too stupid to take care of him.
It’s a tough start for the progenitor of the Blue Steel look, but it’s exactly what Stiller – who directs (his sixth movie behind the camera after Reality Bites, The Cable Guy, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder, and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty), and co-scripts with actor/writer, Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder, Iron Man 2), and writer/directors, Nicholas Stoller (Bad Neighbours) and John Hamburg (Along Came Polly) – wanted, even to the point that he knowingly scratched his wife from the movie. “Christine understood for the story what it meant,” Stiller explains to FilmInk in LA. “You do see her more in the movie. But we wanted to reboot it and give Derek a new place to start from where he has to reinvent himself. Hansel now hates Derek too, because he feels that Derek is responsible for killing his career, and he feels that he made a mistake becoming his friend in the first place. So at the beginning of the movie, they’re both in hiding and living these lives of solitude.”

Despite Zoolander being a cult favourite, the road to the sequel has been a winding, precarious one with more than a few dead ends and detours. After Derek Zoolander’s co-creator, Drake Sather, took his own life in 2004 (“That was the main thing that stopped us from going forward earlier,” Stiller says with obvious sadness), Stiller co-penned an initial script with Nicholas Stoller in 2005, which was warehoused until 2010 when he teamed with Justin Theroux (“We’ve been friends for twenty years. He was in Zoolander as the evil DJ, and he’s always had a connection with the project”), nutting out the core of what would become the final film. It then took another five years for everything (budgets, schedules, and the like) to converge, making Zoolander 2 a decidedly belated follow-up. “It’s had a long history,” Stiller sighs. “But it was fun getting the group back together, and to find what we felt were the things that people connected with. I’ve never really done that. I’ve done a lot of sequels as an actor, but I’ve never done one as a director and writer. It was a new process for me. You feel both the excitement and the anticipation that the audience has, and also the pressure too that you want to live up to what you think the fans want it to be. That’s definitely a challenge.”
After the success of the first film, which was a surprise moderate hit (“The studio didn’t know what we were doing, and we didn’t really know what we were doing; we were just exploring this thing that we’d done as a short”), it wasn’t a challenge bringing on big names for roles in the follow-up. Zoolander 2 features Penelope Cruz, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kim Kardashian, Kristen Wiig, Kanye West, Ariana Grande, the return of Will Ferrell, and – as seen in the film’s trailer – Justin Bieber, who gets shot in the first scene. “Justin is a very polarising figure, as we know,” Stiller smiles. “He has a huge fanbase, and he’s in the process of figuring it all out. It was great for him to make fun of himself, and he saw the value of it. He’s been a great partner in the movie. He was in the script back in 2010, and a lot has happened in the last five years. He was in the initial script as a young, innocent pop star. And now there’s all of this baggage that feeds into the movie, but he was always in there as the person who kicked off the movie.”
What has the reaction been from male models over the years? “Male models?! All the male models that I hang out with,” Stiller laughs. “I don’t know…I think that they’re fine with it. What’s interesting for me is that the movie has made a connection with younger people over the years. Twelve-year-old kids are aware of the movie! That’s about the characters more than the fashion aspect, or maybe just the tone of the comedy, which is just so broad. Zoolander wasn’t really a big hit when it came out, but the movie has had this life after the release, which has been really interesting.”
Zoolander 2 is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital now.