Ella Stiller knew the titular role in new off-Broadway play Dilaria was perfect for her when she noticed the Bravo references.
“I eat, sleep, and breathe Bravo,” she says over coffee at Friedman’s on the Upper West Side. Her favorite Bravo-lebrity is Erika Jayne, of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame.
“I happen to have a little bit of a social media friendship with her. I love her so much. My dad and I are big Erika Jayne fans,” she says. “She's also on my vision board for my character.”
Why? “Because she is lovable yet terrifying in the most badass way imaginable.” It’s a fair comparison. Jayne is a straight-shooter, but also kind of an as*hole, with a personality you can’t help but keep coming back to even when you shouldn’t.
Such is true for Dilaria, an early twenty-something girl in New York who obsesses over herself, manipulates her best friend Georgia (played by Chiara Aurelia) and pseudo-boyfriend Noah (Christopher Briney) for attention, and projects her insecurities full-throttle into the world. Still, Dilaria’s friends are sucked into her vortex; she can also be funny, contagiously warm, and a killer storyteller. But when she fakes her death for Instagram likes, she sets into motion a darkly comedic play about toxic friendships, internet culture, and the desire to be loved.
Stiller plays Dilaria in a way that takes her seriously, faults and all. She monologues Dilaria’s ridiculous stories un-self-consciously and keeps a straight face even when her castmates (looking at you, Briney) crack an accidental smile at her antics.
“The thing is with Chris, I honestly don't think I've ever worked with an actor before, until him, where I genuinely am afraid every night that I'm going to crack up on stage,” Stiller says. “There's just something about the way that we play off each other and f*ck with each other. There are some moments that are not even a joke, but I can just see in his eyes that he's clocking how absurd and funny it is.”
The story is absurd, and chaotic, but the acting is deeply sincere from all three stars, exposing the pressures of the Instagram attention economy and what it’s like to be a young woman making her way in the world.
“The main thing I love about the play, honestly, you read it and you think, ‘Oh wow, that girl Dilaria is insane,’” Stiller says. “But you also relate to her. My hope is that every woman at least is seeing a little bit of themselves in Dilaria. She says what no one else can say or can get away with saying. There's so much rage and so much anxiety and so much fear in her that is the cause of all of her unpredictability. We're in a time where that's what a lot of young women are feeling all the time, and she doesn't have a way to deal with it and it feels really wrong.”
Ella Stiller, who was born in Los Angeles but raised in New York City, comes from a line of great comedians. She’s the daughter of Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor, and the granddaughter of comedians, actors, and writers Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. She’s been told she has her mom’s smile and her dad’s intense gaze. “I thought that was the funniest thing ever. I'm like, ‘I guess he does have piercing blue eyes,’” she says. We joke that in some ways, that’s his whole thing, that there’s a word or two for that gaze.
But it goes deeper than appearance. “I think my dad and I are very similar in the way our brains work and the way we view art and writing and creativity. I feel he and I are very much cut from the same cloth,” she says. “I feel I get a lot of my everyday stuff or mannerisms from my mom. We all, collectively, get our sense of humor from each other. We have a very specific way of joking in my family, which I love so much. And sometimes I find myself making jokes and I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I sounded exactly like my mom.’ …I am surrounded by a lot of really smart people who make really smart jokes without ego.”
In 2024, Stiller graduated from the Juilliard School with a drama degree. She probably could have left high school and started auditioning immediately, but she was drawn to the classroom environment, the idea of studying your craft deeply. She’s a theatre kid at heart.
“I've always wanted to be an actor, but I always wanted to be a really good actor and I always wanted to be a theater actor,” she says. “I always loved real actor training and feeling like you have those tools.”
But it was also about creating her own network, and embracing who she was as an artist. “I grew up with access to people. My parents, my grandparents were amazing actors and writers and that's incredible and that's an amazing privilege, but I wanted to also have my own people and pave my own way and have my own voice be put out there… I always want to make sure the people that I work with and who I surround myself with are people who really see me as my own person and my own artist. People are going to judge all they want and that's its own thing, but I just always want the people in my life to know who I am and what I want to create and be a part of.”
As a kid, Stiller was “a nightmare,” she says. Anxious and depressed, but without the words for those things yet. She loved attention and independence in equal measure — a classic Aries. (“From the time I was little, people were like, ‘She is an Aries with a capital A.’”) Like many kids who grew up in and around the entertainment industry, she’s been told she was wise beyond her years. She had to be.
“I grew up in an environment where I had to face the real world pretty early and be around a lot of adults and a lot of professional people all the time,” she says. That exposure helped build her confidence, but it also didn’t leave as much room for processing those feelings. She’s grateful that her parents put her in therapy to help teach better coping mechanisms.
“I look back and I really was dealing with so much internal sadness and anxiety. I really have moments now where I feel so much empathy for my young self because I didn't know how to deal with it at the time,” she says. “When you're a kid, your perspective is so much smaller… That's part of why I love Dilaria so much too, is because there's a lot of sadness and a lot of anxiety that I feel you can only really understand if you have that chip in your brain.”
An undercurrent in Dilaria is the profound effect of social media perception; that immense pressure to perform and curate yourself and your life for an audience. On Dilaria’s apartment wall, there’s a clearly edited portrait of her: sharpened cheekbones, full makeup, plucked eyebrows, like she was created with Sims custom content.
“Which, by the way, I love that picture,” Stiller laughs. But it’s key to the themes in the play, a literal mirror to call out our own self-obsession. “In the history of the world, no one has ever had that much access to looking at yourself. You start to forget what you actually look like because you're so obsessed.”
Stiller admits she’s obsessed with Instagram, and the dopamine hits it provides. But as she’s starting her career, Stiller is trying to be herself, to not be consumed with some perception of that self that she can’t control.
“I don't want to be the people who edit themselves and try to be the skinniest person in the world and look like a supermodel all the time,” she says. “The actors that I'm so obsessed with are people who are real people and who are unique looking, and it's about their work and their voice and the way you look is part of that, too. You are yourself, and when we're doing so much to change our appearance these days, it does affect your artistry.”
In the year since she graduated, Stiller has filmed a few episodes of And Just Like That, which will air in July, and the Bobby Farrelly movie Driver’s Ed, alongside Sam Nivola. Meanwhile, she’s kept her day job working at a boutique uptown. Dilaria will run until August 3, and after that, she’ll film an indie movie. Longer term, she hopes to make a TV show that she and her writing partner have written, and direct, write, and produce projects in addition to acting.
She’s into the idea of eventually working with her parents, should the right circumstances fall into place. “My dad and I talk a lot about writing together, and I think we eventually want to write a play together for the two of us, hopefully,” she says. “I would love, love, love to work with everyone in my family, just because I think it's unique and special when you get to do that because you have that relationship that a lot of times you have to build or work for… Because also growing up, that's what my dad always said — when you watch his movies, so many of the little random parts in it are family members or a family friend or something. And it's almost just a hidden gem Easter egg thing… you can put little parts of your own self and life into it.”
But at the end of the day, she always wants to return to the theater.
While filming And Just Like That, she got to talk to Cynthia Nixon, who had done theater with her grandparents, who are both deceased. Stiller feels connected to them more than ever in the phase of life she’s in now, especially since she never got to know them as an adult.
“I am really mourning the loss of what that relationship could have been and the wisdom and the different connection that would've been, because I’m so proud of my grandparents' legacy and I'm so amazed by them,” Stiller says. “I feel really connected to Anne because she was an incredible theater actress. Both of them were, but people have been saying I look like her or have this [vibe]... I feel it's a moment right now of realizing that whatever the next phase of life is after death, she is involved in some way [in my life]. They both are. I have to believe they're pretty high up there in the ranks of the theater gods.”
Photographer / Assoc. Visuals Editor Bea Oyster
Makeup Courtesy of Suzy Gerstein
Associate Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Culture Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
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