No Anxiety. OK, a Little.

In the fall movie “Zoolander,” the spoofy tale of a male model caught up in international, “Manchurian Candidate”-style political intrigue, the dim-witted hero Derek Zoolander--played by Ben Stiller--has a number of killer expressions that have catapulted him to the top of the catwalk. There is “Blue Steel,” “Ferrari” and, later in the film, the much-heralded beauty-weapon-in-disguise “Magnum.” The joke is that all the looks are the same overly serious, faux-gaunt, cheekbone-enhancing, lip-puckering mug.

Ben Stiller admits it’s an exaggerated version of the look that overtakes his face when he brushes his hair in the morning. “My wife will say, ‘Why are you doing that thing with your lips?”’ Stiller says wryly.

Stiller, who also co-wrote and directed the Paramount film, which opens Sept. 28, doesn’t remotely think he’s beautiful, which is also part of the gag of “Zoolander.” He thinks he’s like most people--OK-looking from one particular angle--”but only a really, really special angle that you have to always hit. I’m like that. It’s kind of where the look comes from.”

Indeed, up close, almost every one of Stiller’s features appears about a millimeter too long to qualify for conventional celebrity heartthrob. His forehead is too prominent, his nose too pointy, his lips too full, his jaw too long, his brow too determined. The only movie-starrish element are his perfectly straight teeth, which gleam with preternatural whiteness, and an air of confidence that seems at odd with his persona as America’s anxious young man.

At 35, despite more than 15 years in Hollywood proper and a show-biz childhood, Stiller is now known as America’s poet laureate of sweat, the prince of twitchiness, the guy who got his penis infamously snared in his zipper in 1998’s “There’s Something About Mary” and who surreptitiously painted a cat and inadvertently popped a cork into Grandma’s ashes in last year’s “Meet the Parents.” Almost no embarrassment appears too great if it’s going to result in a laugh.

If Derek Zoolander has his look, so Ben Stiller--unlikely screen star--has his. It features a slightly stooped back and an almost permanently furled brow. Its top note is unabashed yearning, romantic yearning, but underneath is the distinct aroma of nebbish fury. “I do have anger,” Stiller admits. “Rage and anxiety are kind of a funny mix because they’re fighting against each other, and I definitely cop to that.”

“Ben’s pretty selective,” says director Jay Roach, recalling the beginning of the “Meet the Parents” shoot. Stiller’s part was tailored to and by him, rewritten as Jewish (he’s half) and a male nurse, both features that accentuated his character’s underdog status. “Ben’s not automatically going to just hand himself over to you [the director], saying, ‘Here, I’m your puppet. Do what you want.’ He’s going to engage you and test your insight into the character.”

“There’s gravitas there,” adds his close friend Jerry Stahl, a writer whose descent into drug addiction Stiller reenacted in one of his few forays into drama, “Permanent Midnight” (1998). “He’s not some neurotic, whining Woody Allen type.”

Stiller is perhaps the only comedic star of his generation who didn’t come from stand-up, and over a late lunch at one of his hangouts, a hippie-ish French bistro on the banks of the 101 Freeway, he doesn’t flap-jaw, or gab, or generally wear his look-at-me-ma gene on his sleeve. His face has an unexpected repose, with clear gray eyes matching the gray flecks in his hair.

“He’s not the class clown,” says his wife, actress Christine Taylor. “When I first met him after seeing all his work, he wasn’t trying to crack a joke. He’s just a serious, real, connected guy. He doesn’t even consider himself that funny, which is so ironic, given that he’s in some of the funniest movies.”

Although he’s lived in L.A. for more than a decade, he still dresses all in black, a seeming remnant of New York armor. He’s alternately friendly and amusing, referential to the Albert Brooks-loving Ben Stiller persona he’s projected in other interviews and at moments determined to send his commentary through the celebrity bland-o-meter, which renders speech into inoffensive, meaningless mush.

“Do you think I’d be good in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee?” he asks jokingly, after a platitudinous conversation about the effects of 1996’s “The Cable Guy,” one of Jim Carrey’s few flops. It happens to be the last movie Stiller directed before refashioning himself into a mainstream comedy star.

Stiller pointedly doesn’t want to be reduced to Mr. Anxiety Guy.

“I’m not like the guy I play in the movies,” he says, although he admits, “I don’t think I’d be able to do what I do if it wasn’t an aspect of my personality. But I’m not comfortable to just be categorized in that way.” He repeats this point several times. “That’s why ‘Zoolander’ is important to me.”

If “Zoolander” isn’t exactly full of Oscar-sized histrionics, it’s still a change of pace for Stiller. Based on a Luke Perry-type character he created with writer and friend Drake Sather for the VH1 Fashion Awards, “Zoolander” is a throwback to Stiller’s sketch comedy days, an amiable, goofy series of riffs on why, as the media kit notes, “there are no male models who live past the age of 30.” Derek Zoolander doesn’t have enough brain cells to even begin to sustain a neurosis.

The movie can also be seen as a paean to his wife, Taylor, who uncannily resembles Marcia Brady, whom she actually played in “The Brady Bunch Movie.” Newly married, Stiller didn’t want to make his wife audition for a role in his movie or put that kind of pressure on their relationship. Yet, after interviewing actresses for a couple of months, he finally just offered her the part. In a role reversal, Stiller plays the hapless but sweet damsel-in-distress role, while she is the enterprising journalist-turned-gumshoe who saves him.

“It’s not like an overriding message about male vanity,” Stiller says. “It’s easy to have fun with the characters because a lot of them are so self-involved.” He’s not even particularly taken by the fashion world, he says, although he was fascinated by the powers of the arbiters of taste.

“I find it interesting--people who make careers and lives out of determining what’s in and what’s out, and what is in style. The job of a magazine editor--it’s literally somebody saying, ‘I like that. I don’t like that. That person is cool. That person isn’t.’ It’s one of those jobs--what are the qualifications for it?”

Stiller’s been on both sides, eminently fashionable (during his run at the Emmy-winning “The Ben Stiller Show” through his coronation in the New York Times as the leader of a band of young subversive comics), and eminently not (in the aftermath of “The Cable Guy” debacle), then fashionable again, or at least a proven box-office commodity. Stiller is almost blase about the predictability of that cycle, of how success attracts and failure repels.

“It’s all based on how much currency you put in other people, your need to have other people accept you,” he says. But he admits that success allows him the freedom to direct again and do what he wants creatively. “Freedom of choice. That’s something of value. My goal is to not do the same thing again.”

“I’ve never seen a man less content to rest on his laurels,” Stahl says with a sigh. “His laurels feel like cactus to him. He likes to make it hot for himself.”

A week after the lunch, Stiller is holed up on a dubbing stage on the Universal lot watching a sequence in which Zoolander and the journalist meet up with a conspiracy theorist, played by none other than former “X-Files” star David Duchovny, in the pitch black of a New York cemetery.

For the part, Stiller adopted what he describes as “a bad Marilyn Monroe impression,” a breathy cocktail particularly at odds with the impression Stiller gives today. Decked out again in all black, he reeks more of fatigue and a cold than simpering supermodel sensuality. Every minute of his schedule is planned, and he has to move through the day with the methodical precision befitting a workaholic on a work jag (although he does make room for family and friends--for instance, picking up his mother, comedian Anne Meara, who doesn’t drive, at her hotel, or his friend Stahl from the hospital after surgery).

Although the film’s been officially finished for a week, Stiller can’t stop fiddling. He’s sheared off an annoying 16-second interlude and added a flying orange mochaccino joke to one of the film’s more somber moments.

“I think the electronic percussion is drowning out the orchestral music. I don’t like that,” he says to the group of editors and sound editors as they replay the sequence.

In the last week, Stiller went personally to argue on “Zoolander’s” behalf in front of the appeals board of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. The MPAA ratings board, made up of ordinary citizens, initially granted “Zoolander” an R rating. Stiller sent recut versions back five more times, but the MPAA ultimately refused to budge over what can only be described as the orgy scene.

“I prefer to call it the love fest,” Stiller says diplomatically. He’s featured in this hyper-silly interlude, along with his wife; the hilarious Owen Wilson, who plays another supermodel; a Maori tribesman; and a midget. The goat was abandoned on the cutting-room floor.

So he went before the 12-person appeals panel, made up of distributors and exhibitors. “It was like I was reliving my bar mitzvah,” he recalls. Joan Graves, president of the MPAA ratings board, was also there, defending the board’s reservations about group sex.

“Zoolander” ended up with a PG-13 rating after he persuaded the board the scene was more silly than sexy. Stiller is relieved, but he pointedly doesn’t want to sound like a zealot on the issue. “It doesn’t make sense to get argumentative. They were much more open-minded then I thought,” he says, even adding for good measure that “Joan and I hugged when it was all over.”

Show biz appears to have been hard-wired into Stiller’s DNA. He debuted at the age of 8 playing “Chopsticks” with his sister on “The Mike Douglas Show.” His mother tells him that he was taught to swim in a pool in Las Vegas by the Pips, as in Gladys Knight & the Pips. There are home movies of him being cuddled by Rodney Dangerfield.

If the snapshots sound glamorous, the flip side to being the child of comedy duo (Jerry) Stiller & (Anne) Meara, staples of “The Ed Sullivan Show” and countless cross-country tours, was that they were often not home. They traveled, touring, working in L.A. for weeks at a time, leaving Stiller and his older sister, Amy, at home alone in their Riverside Drive apartment cared for by their Jamaican housekeeper, Hazel.

Stiller describes himself as the kind of New York pipsqueak who hated school and got mugged not infrequently, mostly by other kids wanting to relieve him of his watch or his bus change. These sidewalk scuffles played an important role in the home movies he started making after his dad gave him a Super-8 camera and editing console at the age of 10.

He describes his first efforts as “little ‘Death Wish’ fantasy films” that show him getting mugged and then “me getting my friend and going after the kid and beating him up.” They have titles like “Murder in the Park.” “Yes, empowerment films, “ he jokes. “Male empowerment, child empowerment, Upper West Side kid empowerment.”

He segued into the disaster genre with a remake of “Airport ‘75” done in the foyer of the apartment. Stiller loved disaster flicks, so much so that when he acted as Gene Hackman’s son in the upcoming film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” he couldn’t muffle his former love.

“I never thought I would be cast as his son. He’s about two feet taller than I am,” Stiller cracks. “I really tried to stay out of his way because you know, he’s Gene Hackman. I promised myself the whole movie that I was not going to tell him that I’ve seen ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ 20 times ... of course I had to tell him. I immediately regretted it.”

In high school, he looked much as he did in “There’s Something about Mary,” although without braces. “I definitely wasn’t the person who peaked in high school. I had bad skin, and sometimes I was a little overweight. I don’t want to paint myself as a total nerd, but there were periods when I was awkward, and that all kind of contributes to where you get as a person. I was just trying to figure it out. My hormones were trying to figure it out.”

He attended UCLA for less than a year, then moved back to New York, where he interned at the Actors Studio and waited tables before his mother landed him an audition and he won himself a part in the 1986 Lincoln Center revival of “The House of Blue Leaves.”

He really launched his career, however, in the early ‘90s with a short parody of Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money.” Titled “The Hustler of Money,” it starred his “Leaves” co-stars Swoosie Kurtz and Stockard Channing, and was shown on “Saturday Night Live.” It presaged Fox’s 1992 “The Ben Stiller Show,” a sketch-comedy series. Skits included a “Cape Fear” takeoff featuring Eddie Munster in the Robert De Niro role; a lewd version of the supposed game show “Amish Studs”; as well as a bloviating, smarmy Hollywood agent who dispensed insincere advice to celebrities such as Roseanne.

“When we made fun of something on ‘The Ben Stiller Show,’ most of the time it was something we liked,” recalls the show’s co-creator, Judd Apatow. “For the most part, we weren’t trying to tear things down. Ben really likes Tom Cruise, so it’s fun to do a Tom Cruise sketch. He really likes U2, so it’s fun to do a U2 sketch.”

The series was canceled after 13 episodes, but the staff won a writing Emmy and the show wound up leading to Stiller’ first directing gig in 1994, “Reality Bites,” a wry little examination of slacker anomie and romance Texas-style.

The film’s youthful protagonists--a scruffed-up, chain-smoking Ethan Hawke, and Winona Ryder--evince a steady stream of ambivalence about success, growing up and selling out. Stiller, perhaps not incidentally, has the role of devil-yuppie, the super-nice careerist who nonetheless takes the Ryder character’s personal documentary and tarts it up with slick graphics and shallow MTV-speak. To make the situation worse, he doesn’t even realize how he’s betrayed her.

Stiller was only 27.

Played with more desperation, Stiller’s “Reality Bites” character could have been Sammy Glick, or as Budd Schulberg notes in one of the later editions of his 1941 classic, “What Makes Sammy Run,” one of those bright young men who thinks Sammy is not a cautionary tale of ambition run amok but a self-help primer for career advancement.

Stiller has been obsessed with Sammy ever since he read the book in the early ‘90s, when he was visiting then-girlfriend Jeanne Tripplehorn on the Hawaii set of “Waterworld.” The first time he met Stahl, he suggested the pair team up to write the screenplay. “The next thing I know, I’m on a plane to St. Bart’s, where I have never been. I’m on a private jet eating Sly Stallone’s leftover tuna sandwich, and we were off and running,” Stahl recalls.

The project has been stalled for years, until recently, it appears. Stiller is vague about why. “It’s a tough story, a Hollywood story,” he murmurs, acknowledging that the self-loathing Jew aspect of the story appears to be a nettlesome subject for studio executives.

“I think it’s a dicey issue,” Stiller ventures. “It’ s hard to show that in a way that doesn’t come off the wrong way, and myself, as someone who’s Jewish, I feel very concerned to portray that in the right light. Also, I don’t want that issue to override the rest of the story, the aspect of the climber who will do anything to get to the top.”

Unlike some comics who do dramatic turns to try to win Oscars, Stiller feels no need to prove his ability to gnaw scenery. The dark undertones of Ben Stiller add a dollop of pathos to his comic high jinks.

This is a man who, after all, turned Jim Carrey into a lisping psycho, his brain addled by too much TV in “Cable Guy,” and whose portrait of a junkie in “Permanent Midnight” was less about victimhood than vicious self-hatred.

There was also his intensely unlikable character in Neil LaBute’s “Your Friends & Neighbors,” the 1998 film in which Stiller manages a truly excruciating sex scene. This spectacle of yuppie cruelty might have actually gone too far. “I can’t watch that movie,” Stiller says.

“I wanted to work with [Neil] because I liked his first movie and I like working with people who have a really clear sense of what they want. It’s just hard to see yourself playing a character so unlikable with so few redeeming qualities.”

Indeed, LaBute recalls with merriment watching Stiller watch himself in that film. “When he first saw the movie, he kept slowly dipping down into his seat. The more it went on, the further he disappeared into his seat. He was quite unnerved by how far he let himself go.”

Stiller’s producing partner, Stuart Cornfeld, says it’s actually much easier than it seems to reconcile the guy who wants to prance around as a vapid supermodel with the one who wants to explore how a 1940s schmo strives for the top of Hollywood.

“He’s a smart guy who’s really drawn to a diverse group of projects. They have a certain commonality to them, in that they deal with obsession and people who have to be either No. 1 or have to simply do what they need to do.”

As Stiller hunches in his chair watching “Zoolander” like a lion surveying his prey, he appears to have only one credo.

“Acting is about committing,” he says. “You just have to commit to what you’re doing. You have to be in it and be willing to be a part of it. You can’t comment on what you’re doing because if you do that, the audience is not going to buy it. The way my mind works--if the movie works, it’s not embarrassing.” *