By Gill Pringle
“She was just in my head from the beginning,” writer, director, and star, Ben Stiller, says of Penelope Cruz, his new co-star in Zoolander 2, which continues the adventures of his beautiful but empty headed male model, Derek Zoolander, who first torched the big screen in 2001. “Plus, we’d been thinking about setting the sequel in a different place. We thought about Paris, and we thought about Milan. But I love Rome, and I felt that there was some sort of tonal thing that we could do which would make it feel like a crazy little Italian movie a little bit, which would relate to what we were doing. At one point, we thought about doing it in New York, Miami, or Paris, but then we just ended up focusing in on Rome. From the beginning, I thought that there should be a new woman for Derek to interact with. Then I thought, ‘Why not get Penelope Cruz?’” Stiller laughs. “I hadn’t seen her in a lot of American comedies, and I thought that it would be cool for her to be the person that’s taking Derek through this world. She was always in my head even before we wrote the script, and she was the first person that we sent the script to. Obviously, she’s very beautiful,” Stiller says, pulling a silly face. “She has this great accent, and when she plays stuff straight, it’s really funny too. You need somebody who’s taking things very seriously for Derek to play off. Her character, Valentina, has her own backstory in the movie that has to do with modelling, and I thought that it would be fun to have this movie exist in a different environment, and to make it more international.”
There was, however, one little problem. In order to bring the Oscar nominated Penelope Cruz into the Zoolander fold as a new love interest, Stiller would first have to dispense with the character of Matilda Jeffries, the journalist with whom dopey Derek found apparently everlasting love at the end of the first film. So, at the beginning of the sequel, Derek hits the skids: 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; Matilda (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. “He just doesn’t know how to take care of a child,” Stiller explains. “He can’t make spaghetti sauce and things like that. So Child Services takes him away from him. So Derek loses his son and loses the woman that he loves more than anything in the world, and then goes off into seclusion.”
There was, however, another little problem: Matilda is played by Christine Taylor, Ben Stiller’s real life wife. “Christine understood for the story what it meant,” Stiller explains to FilmInk in LA of effectively knocking off his real life missus. “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.”
Along with Penelope Cruz, there are plenty of other new additions to the cast, including Kristen Wiig, Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, Kim Kardashian, and the ever prolific Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game, Sherlock), who plays the androgynous supermodel, All. “He was definitely game,” Stiller says. “I called him up, and we’d been talking about something else – a different project that didn’t happen – and he just mentioned to me that he really liked Zoolander, and that if there was anything ever in Zoolander, that he would be open to talking about it. We came up with this idea, and I told him the idea before we had a script, and he said yes without even reading it, which is great. It’s a cameo, but it’s a great cameo. He totally inhabited the role and went for it. He’s such a unique talent. It’s been fun to go back into the world of Derek Zoolander.”
Zoolander 2 is released in cinemas on February 11.
