Ben Stiller hasn't led a major movie in seven years, and he revealed at the world premiere of his new film that he made a deliberate choice to pull back from acting for an important reason.

The 58-year-old star of comedy hits like Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Dodgeball, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Night at the Museum appeared on stage at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival debut of his upcoming movie Nutcrackers on Thursday night, where he explained to the audience why it's been so long since he lead a feature film, last fronting 2017's Brad's Status and The Meyerowitz Stories.

"I've been working on projects as a director and producer for a while, and wanting to act, but I kind of made the choice a few years ago that I was only going to do something if it really hit me," Stiller said following the screening, elaborating that director David Gordon Green's holiday-tinged comedy spoke to him on an emotional level.

courtesy of TIFF

"David emailed me one night, and for some reason I read it right way," the star, who also produced Nutcrackers, recalled of the script, which centers on a smug real estate professional (Stiller) who travels to a farmhouse in Ohio to help a child services worker (Linda Cardellini) find a home for his four unruly, orphaned nephews at Christmastime.

"Intuition hit me, there's something about this movie, I want to make this movie, I want to meet these kids," he elaborated. "I can't explain it to you, other than this feels like something I want to do and to work with David, knowing where he was coming from with it, it was such an organic, emotionally real place."

The film also stars a quad of real-life brothers: Homer, Ulysses, and twins Atlas and Arlo Janson, who all received a sustained standing ovation from the TIFF audience as they took the stage alongside Stiller and Green at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall.

Among discussions about the fun they had on set (including a moment where one of the twins let out a hilarious eight-second-long fart that Green eventually edited audio of into the movie), Stiller praised the performances of his young costars as another reason he was excited by the prospect of working on it.

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"I'm so happy that David called me about this movie. It's so from the heart, it's so organic, he sent me this email, and he said, I've got this idea and there are these four kids, they've never been in a movie before, but I think they're incredible. I want to shoot at their farm in Ohio and there's going to be hogs and cats," Stiller remembered. "I was like, all right! There's something so real about making this movie. It was unlike any experience I've ever had."

Since stepping back from lead parts, Stiller has taken supporting roles and cameos in a range of films and TV shows, like Greed (2019), Hubie Halloween (2020), the pandemic heist film Locked Down (2021), and in Billy Eichner's gay rom-com Bros in 2022. He also directed all seven episodes of the limited series Escape at Dannemora, as well as multiple episodes of Apple TV+ series Severance.

Nutcrackers does not yet have a distributor or a confirmed release date.