Ben Stiller Meets With Volodymyr Zelensky During Ukraine Trip

Ben Stiller, who has been on a tour of Ukraine and Poland as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), met in person with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday during World Refugee Day.

In a video of the exchange, Stiller approaches Zelensky and calls their meeting “a great honor for me.” He calls the country’s President “my hero,” because he “quit a great acting career for this.” Zelensky quickly quips back that his career was “not so great as you,” in reference to Stiller.

“What you’ve done and the way you’ve rallied the country, and what you know for the world it’s really inspiring,” Stiller added in praise of Zelensky. While sitting down with the President, Stiller reflected on the destruction of the country he has now witnessed in person.

“You see it on TV, you see it on social media, and you know it’s something else to actually see it and feel it. And then to talk to the people, we talked to a bunch of people this morning,” Stiller said.

Stiller toured some cities in Ukraine on Monday, including the town of Irpin near the capital of Kyiv which saw heavy fighting early in the invasion and sustained almost 300 casualties. He was also touring refugee sites in Poland, where an estimated half of Ukraine’s eight million refugees have fled since the invasion began in February.