What Mr. Stiller neglected to mention was that his new film, “Greenberg,” happens to be a small-scale production with an auteur pedigree (written and directed by Noah Baumbach) and is as intimate and independent-minded a movie as he has done in years. 

“I never thought my path would progress the way it has,” Mr. Stiller said recently in an interview at a Manhattan hotel. The son of the comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, he first made his mark in sketch comedy, on “Saturday Night Live” and his own short-lived but fondly remembered early 1990s Fox series “The Ben Stiller Show” (on which his friend Judd Apatow got his start). He thought of himself more as a director. As for acting, “I just didn’t think I’d get that opportunity,” he said. 

Mr. Stiller has since directed four features, most recently “Tropic Thunder” (2008), but has also become one of the biggest (and most profitable) movie stars on the planet and the linchpin of a powerful funnyman clique. While most of the members of this cohort (which also includes Will Ferrell, Jack Black and various actors in the Apatow company) tend to blend into a larger brotherhood, Mr. Stiller has by and large had the career of a leading man. He anchors family movies and romantic comedies alike, and it says something about his charisma— and perhaps about the dark appetites of the moviegoing public — that he has done so with a screen presence that is often synonymous with anxiety, pain and humiliation.