Ben Stiller
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After just covering fellow Tropic Thunder co-star Jack Black, Reel Movie Stars is back with the film's director, Ben Stiller.

Our sixth installment of Reel Movie Stars is absolutely considering a member of the Frat Pack and is by far one of its most prolific members.

In honor of Stiller's return to the director's seat, we've gone ahead and added 22 movies to the comedian's filmography and one of the most complete biographies the Reel editors have ever put together.

But what would a Reel Movie Star blog be without some fun facts:

• Ben Stiller has been impersonating Tom Cruise since his show, The Ben Stiller Show.  He got Cruise to star in Tropic Thunder!
• His father Jerry Stiller played his father in The Heartbreak Kid
• He played his father Jerry Stiller's father in The King of Queens
• His father, Jerry, is Jewish and his mother, Anne, is Irish and converted to Jusaism before marrying Jerry.
• Won an Emmy award for his writing on The Ben Stiller Show
• Is Only 5'8
• Married to Christine Taylor who he co-stared with in Zoolander, Dodgeball, and Tropic Thunder
• Ben and Christine have two children together: daughter Ella Olivia and son Quinlin Dempsey

Now we'd like to leave you with some pictures of this amazing writer, director, and actor:

Ben Stiller wrote, directed, produced and starred in Tropic Thunder. Did the star mind all the work?

He was recently asked about it by MoviesOnline. Here's Stiller's reply:

The hardest scene for me in the movie was the scene after the action sequence in the beginning. Strangely, like the scene in the movie, it doesn’t really stand out as looking that complicated, but just shooting the movie crew and shooting the reveal of the movie set.

I think it was the combination of having these fake arms on and my hands were tied behind my back and I was playing an actor who was trying to tell the director to cut and the director was saying “Don’t cut” but I was the director in real life.

It was very confusing and there was a lot going on and there were so many people in the scene. The action stuff was so specific and we’d spent so many months prepping it with storyboards and pre-viz and all that stuff gets broken down because it has to.

Ben Stiller takes on the role of Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder.

But then when we got to this scene where we had to shoot a movie set itself, that was really the most complicated, strangely, and most frustrating. I was really surprised at how hard that was. In general, the action stuff to me was really fun to do because you can actually take time with it and it’s very painstaking, but you get to prep every single shot and you do it one shot at a time. While the other stuff that’s more free form, you kind of have to figure it out as you go along.

When you’ve got five or six actors in every scene too, there’s a lot of coverage with the camera. You’ve got to shoot everybody. We had a really good time though and we had really good time to prepare the movie. I had six months or so.

And then I got out there for a couple of weeks with the actors rehearsing with the cameraman and we shot angles and did a lot of pre-work on those scenes so that when we got out to shooting them we knew basically how we were approaching it, because I felt like I needed to do that if I was going to be acting in the scenes.

Ben Stiller is directing his first film in years, the comedy Tropic Thunder, due out on July 11. The actor recently discussed the film with ComingSoon.net...

ComingSoon.net: It's been seven years since you directed a movie. Why was now the time go back and what was it about this idea that made you want to direct again?
Ben Stiller: Well, this movie I've been working on for a while. I had the idea for the movie like twenty years ago when I was doing "Empire of the Sun" in 1987 because at that time, that's when all these Vietnam movies were being made and my friends and I were going on auditions for these Vietnam movies and my friends were getting them and going away to fake boot camps.

It seemed like there was a time when all actors were going away to fake boot camp and talking about these incredible experiences that they had and how it really changed their lives and there was something there that seemed funny to me. Maybe it was because I wasn't getting parts in those movies, but I was like, "Oh, wow. You're going off and getting all of that. What about people who actually go to war?"

The actors were like owning this experience as if it was like this real and incredible experience. I'm sure that it was a great experience, but it wasn't like actually going to real boot camp.

So that was percolating in my head and I thought maybe I'd do a short or a sketch about actors who go away and do Vietnam films and come back and are forgotten, trying to parallel the veteran's experiences. That didn't seem funny at all. (laughter) So I put that away.

Then the idea came that it might be cool to have a movie about a bunch of actors that get stuck out in the jungle on a movie and are caught in this real situation, so literally, for the last ten years I worked on a first act of it, about ten years ago, and then Justin [Theroux] came on about eight years ago. I said, "Come on, lets work this."

Then we brought on Etan Cohen about four years ago, so literally over the last ten years we've been working on the script in different and various forms. I would go away for a few weeks on vacation or something and work on it.

Read the complete interview with Stiller now.

With a cast including Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Matthew McConaughey, Tropic Thunder has the pedigree to become a major success.

"It's about a bunch of movies stars, and a rapper/actor, who get cast in this Vietnam War movie and get sent over to Vietnam to make this film," said Stiller, who directs and stars in the flick.

"[Their movie] is going over budget," he said to MTV, "and the director is freaking out because they're not getting the reality [look] that they need. So he takes them off into the jungle, and the actors get stuck out in the jungle for real."

Well, okay then.

"I play a guy named Rob Slolom, who is the executive in charge of the movie within the movie Tropic Thunder," said actor Danny McBride, pointing to his mullet. "I get to rock this so it should be a good time."

"The movie is a funny Apocalypse Now," Stiller said of the tone he's going for.

Works for us.