Ben Stiller’s ‘Zoolander’ Co-star Marked a Career “High Point”

Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Aniston, Snoop Dogg, Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Dick Van Dyke — the list goes on — these are all super talents who’ve shared the screen with Ben Stiller across his four-decade career. But according to the actor-director himself, who’s been speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the “high point” came on the set of his 2001 fashion comedy Zoolander, in which he portrayed male model Derek Zoolander.

In Zoolander, “Life on Mars” and “Ziggy Stardust” icon David Bowie stops by for a scene as himself, judging the “walk-off” between Derek and Owen Wilson’s Hansel McDonald. He’s not the only major face to appear for a cameo, either, as the likes of Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, Natalie Portman, Donald Trump, Gwen Stefani, and Winona Ryder also show up at one point or another. On working beside Bowie (who died in 2016, aged 69) for this brief moment, Stiller reflected:

“Having worked with so many different people over the years, it’s really one of the high points to have had that time with him. He was incredibly generous, incredibly classy — everybody on set was in awe. I couldn’t believe he said yes. But he had a great sense of humor and was incredibly self-deprecating, and I feel really, really fortunate that I got to spend a little time with him. He gave our movie so much credibility by being in that scene. So it’s been a high point in my career to be able to have that time with him, for sure.”

David Bowie’s Movie Highlights

Although Bowie’s legacy is naturally a musical one — it’s approximated that he sold more than 100 million records worldwide — his many movie credits are something to behold. The first one worth mentioning is his role as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth; directed by none other than Nicolas Roeg, whose previous work included the classic horror Don’t Look Now.

For the turkey dinner lovers out there, he’ll always be remembered for a quick live-action opening to the Raymond Briggs animation, The Snowman, in which Bowie played a grown-up recollecting one magical Christmas as a boy. Soon after that, he joined debutant director Tony Scott (who’d go on to make Top Gun and True Romance) for the erotic vampire movie The Hunger, before adding Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige to his cinematic résumé.

And yet, it was in Jim Henson’s 1986 gem Labyrinth that the rockstar really soared. As Jareth the Goblin King, Bowie’s singing ability was allowed to flourish across five songs, “Underground”, “Magic Dance”, “Chilly Down”, “As the World Falls Down”, and “Within You.” Amongst his various puppet co-stars (plus Jennifer Connelly, of course), he stood out as an enigmatic and mesmerizing force.