HOLLYWOOD -- Playing straight man to her husband Ben Stiller in Zoolander, Christine Taylor was called upon repeatedly to stare skeptically at him.

That would come easily to most wives, but Stiller and Taylor were still bathed in a newlywed glow.

"For us it was great," said Taylor, 30, who met Stiller when he directed her in a TV pilot in 1999. They married in May, 2000. "We had just got back from our honeymoon and were still in that honeymoon phase, I think," she said. "So it was nice for us to be able to be together and for me to be able to share the experience with him, because he was directing it and producing it and starring in it and had written it, so for me to be able to be a part of it was a gift for us."

Zoolander was a true family affair. Stiller's father Jerry co-stars as Derek's vulgar, track-suited agent Maury Ballstein. His mother, Anne Meara, has a cameo as a fashion show protester. His sister, Amy Stiller, is among the entourage of Derek's modelling rival, Hansel (Owen Wilson, one of Stiller's closest friends). When a dog was called for in a scene, they called in Kahlua, Stiller's and Taylor's own Chocolate Lab.

Taylor is cast as Matilda Jeffries, a Time magazine reporter who meets Derek Zoolander (Stiller) when she's assigned to write an expose on the industry's empty-headed stars. He's wounded, but not too worried --he knows Details is a much more important magazine, anyway -- and she's eventually drawn to his sincerity despite his lack of smarts.

Playing it straight was a change for Taylor, who has more often been cast as the one wearing the outrageous costumes or being the butt of the joke in roles such as her best-known, Marcia Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie and its sequel.

Researching Zoolander led to some offscreen comedy for the couple. Stiller hung out with famous male catwalkers and plastered their home office with photos of cover hunks.

"I mean, some of the craziest pictures. The most bizarre clothes and faces -- and it was all men," Taylor recalled. "We had movers coming in and I think people just kind of wandered by the wall like, 'Whatever.'"

According to her, her husband is a lot more serious (and obviously smarter) than people might think from his comedy characters.

"Maybe a teeny bit of Derek has stayed with Ben," she admitted. "When you play that character for so long -- and I tease him about this -- there are moments ... We all have those mirror faces where we just aren't aware of what we're doing when we look in the mirror. Ben's has definitely become a little Derek. Puckered, sort of.

"He's going to kill me."


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