Watch: Ben Stiller Reveals the Secret to Marriage With Christine Taylor After Reconciliation
Christine Taylor isn’t dodging this difficult memory.
The Dodgeball star recently detailed an “insane” experience from her time in Los Angeles following the end of Hey Dude, sharing how she and then-roommate David Pressman were carjacked outside of their apartment in the early ‘90s.
“We got carjacked together,” Taylor revealed to The Secret World of Alex Mack alum Natanya Ross on the Sept. 16 episode of the We’re Still Here, Babe podcast, “Broad daylight.”
She continued, “It was three in the afternoon. Detroit Street near Beverly Boulevard and we lived in an apartment there, and we got carjacked at gunpoint.”
The Brady Bunch star went on to describe how the surreal experience went down.
“I parked the car. We got out of the car to cross the street to go to our apartment,” she recalled. “This car slowed down, and I didn’t even think twice because the car was slowing down, but it was three in the afternoon, bright sunshine. The guy in the passenger seat got out with a gun and waved to David to stay on the curb and told me to give him the keys.”
However, there was one hiccup as Taylor—who married Ben Stiller in 2000—had an anti-theft club securing her steering wheel, prompting the robbers to call her back to remove it.
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“I had my purse on my shoulder, and I just remember thinking, like, don’t go for the purse, just take the car—just in my head,” the 55-year-old shared. “And then, of course, he said, ‘Leave the purse.’ And in my in the trunk of my car was laundry because it was laundry day—I was going to go to the laundromat later.”
Though the experience occurred more than 30 years ago, Taylor acutely remembers what was going through her head when it happened, expressing, “It probably all happened in the span of a minute and a half or two minutes, but it felt like time stood still and it was so scary.”
And at the time, the now-mom of two—she and Stiller share kids Ella, 24, and Quinlin, 21—didn’t have a way to process what had happened to her and Pressman.
“I wasn’t seeing a therapist. I wasn’t talking, processing trauma in that way,” the Zoolander alum noted to Ross. “You just kind of had your friends and your family to lean on through those kind of moments.”
However, days after the carjacking she was cast in the 1994 horror Night of the Demons 2, which proved to be cathartic. As she put it, “The most therapeutic experience of working through trauma was getting on a set and getting to be in this horror movie where you’re running around screaming with kids your age.”
These days, she’s able to see the toll the traumatic experience took on her in the years after.
“I managed it but I look back on it now and as somebody who’s now been in years of therapy and that incident comes up often—you know trauma in your body and how you respond to that,” she explained. “You have a reaction or you’ll have a trigger.”
“To me very soon after it happened if I saw somebody on the street in a crosswalk my body would freeze,” she said, “because of seeing a person crossing and thinking they’re going to come to the car.”
As for how far Taylor has come since the horrific day in Los Angeles, keep reading for a look inside what her life is like these days with Stiller and their kids.
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