Ben Stiller on DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story

Ben Stiller talks balls, and dodging them, for his latest comedy.

Like Woody Allen before him, Ben Stiller has managed to craft a film persona that audiences tend to assume reflects his own personality. From There's Something About Mary to Meet The Parents, Stiller plays the luckless neurotic like few others. Put him beside some-time screen partner, the laid-back Owen Wilson - with whom he has starred in six films - and this is amplified by ten. However given the huge box office tallies of his most recent comedies Starsky & Hutch and Along Came Polly he has little reason to be neurotic.

"I personally don't see myself as being that type, but I guess there's some energy there that gets picked up on," he says. "I won't make a judgement on that. You are who you are, and you play elements of a character. So I'm sure there's something there that people can see. But I don't look at myself that way, and I don't think in life we're like that - but maybe we are a little bit. I think people tend to put you in boxes; he's the highly-strung guy, he's the laid-back stoner guy. It's simplifying it."

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