Cast and Characters (Meet the Parents) Meet the Parents (2000)
Principal Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Ben Stiller | Greg "Gaylord" Focker |
| Robert De Niro | Jack Byrnes |
| Teri Polo | Pam Byrnes |
| Blythe Danner | Dina Byrnes |
| Nicole DeHuff | Debbie Byrnes |
| Owen Wilson | Kevin Rawley |
| James Rebhorn | Dr. Larry Banks |
| Thomas McCarthy | Bob Banks |
| Jon Abrahams | Denny Byrnes |
| Phyllis George | Linda Banks |
| Kali Rocha | Flight Attendant |
| Bernie Sheredy | Officer LeFlore |
| Owen W. Wilson | (story credit, 1992 short) |
Greg "Gaylord" Focker — Ben Stiller
A male nurse from Chicago whose tool is prepared performance for the right audience. See Ben Stiller (Meet the Parents). Stiller plays Greg as a competent professional whose competence becomes invisible the second Jack's apparatus reads it as evidence. Universal had courted Jim Carrey for the role and developed it for him through a long pre-production cycle; Carrey moved on to How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Stiller — coming off There's Something About Mary (1998) — inherited a script that had been calibrated for someone else's voice and made it his own. (wikipedia)
Jack Byrnes — Robert De Niro
A retired CIA officer who has converted his Long Island household into a low-grade counterintelligence operation. See Robert De Niro (Meet the Parents). The role was a pivot point in De Niro's late career — the actor of Raging Bull and Goodfellas using comic timing as a delivery vehicle for the same controlled menace.
"I think the polygraph idea was Bob's. He came in with that and a few other things and the script got better." — Jay Roach, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)
De Niro was paid a reported $13.5 million for the film and would build the Tribeca Productions banner partly on the franchise's success. See also Stiller and De Niro Casting and Chemistry and Universal's Tracksuit Casting Bet on De Niro.
Pam Byrnes — Teri Polo
The daughter Greg has come to ask for, and the only person in the Byrnes household who consistently pushes back against Jack's surveillance frame. See Teri Polo. Polo had been working steadily in television (Northern Exposure, I'm with Her) and small films when she beat out a long shortlist for the role. Her job, structurally, is to be the audience whose testimony — when she confronts Jack in his own study and tells him he is being a real jerk — finally provides the apparatus with input Greg's performance hasn't contaminated.
Dina Byrnes — Blythe Danner
Pam's mother and the household's emotional thermostat. See Blythe Danner. Danner — by 2000 a thirty-year veteran of stage and screen, and Gwyneth Paltrow's mother — plays Dina as the only Byrnes who treats Greg as a person rather than a candidate. Her warmth is the film's running counterpoint to Jack's coldness.
Debbie Byrnes — Nicole DeHuff
The bride. DeHuff's broken-nose volleyball moment is one of the film's most-cited gags. The role was DeHuff's first major film credit; she would die unexpectedly of pneumonia in 2005 at age thirty. The film's producers reissued tributes after her death.
Kevin Rawley — Owen Wilson
Pam's wealthy ex-fiancé, a Wall Street trader who sculpts in his spare time and has hand-built a wooden altar for Bob and Debbie's wedding. See Owen Wilson. Wilson — already a Wes Anderson regular and a co-writer on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and the upcoming The Royal Tenenbaums — plays Kevin as a man whose ostentatious Zen makes Greg's competence-and-charm engine look small. The casting was a Stiller orbit move; the two had appeared together in The Cable Guy (1996) and would reunite repeatedly.
Dr. Larry Banks — James Rebhorn
Kevin's father, the patrician surgeon who hosts the destroyed wedding. See James Rebhorn. Rebhorn — a character actor who specialized in figures of cold institutional authority (Scent of a Woman, Independence Day, The Game) — gives the Banks household its WASP gravity, the visible counter-weight to the Byrnes household's surveillance gravity.
Bob Banks — Thomas McCarthy
The earnest groom. McCarthy was at this point primarily a working stage actor; he would shortly become a director (The Station Agent in 2003, Spotlight in 2015 winning Best Picture). His Bob is the film's only adult male without an angle.
Denny Byrnes — Jon Abrahams
Pam's stoner younger brother, whose borrowed jacket pockets the marijuana pipe Jack will discover. The role functions structurally as the planted-evidence delivery mechanism for the apparatus.
The film was assembled around Stiller and De Niro's chemistry
Jay Roach has been explicit that the film's real engine is the two-handed scene work between his leads.
"It's basically a two-hander. Ben and Bob — that's the picture. Everything else is built around making sure those scenes land." — Jay Roach, Vulture (2020)
Cast cohesion was managed through pre-production rehearsals at Tribeca that were unusual for studio comedy of the period. Stiller has said in interviews that the rehearsal process was less about line readings than about establishing how a Byrnes-house dinner would actually feel in the room — the silences, the eye contact, the temperature drops. (wikipedia)