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Ben Stiller is giving Meet the Parents fans a taste of what to expect from Ariana Grande in the upcoming fourth movie.
In May it was revealed that Oscar-nominee Grande, 31, will join the cast of Meet the Parents 4. Stiller, 59, teased that the singer will play a central role in the film while he, Robert De Niro and Teri Polo spoke with the Today show on Monday, June 9 to discuss the original film’s 25th anniversary.
“I can’t really talk too much, I guess, at this point about the movie,” Stiller said during the interview, noting that Grande is “so great with comedy.”
“But the character she’s playing is— she’s going to be really, really funny and kind of the whole engine of the new movie,” Stiller added. “So it’s exciting.”
PEOPLE first confirmed that Stiller, De Niro and Polo were reuniting with costar Blythe Danner for a fourth Meet the Parents film in December.
The series began with 2000’s original. Sequels Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers were released in 2004 and 2010. While Stiller and his costars did not provide more details on the fourth movie’s story, they did joke with NBC’s Joe Fryer that the movie will incorporate musical elements.
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“Half the things — the scenes that I have with her will be singing scenes,” De Niro, 81, said, after Polo, 56, joked that De Niro is “an excellent singer [and] dancer.”
Stiller, Polo and De Niro’s interview with Today came after the group reunited for a 25th anniversary screening of the original movie at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Saturday, June 7. Fryer moderated a post-screening conversation with the film’s cast and director Jay Roach on making the movie and what fans can expect from the next entry.
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“I think what spurred the idea was that at this point in time, I’m the age that Bob was when we did the first movie,” Stiller said during that conversation. “Teri is the same age she was when we did first movie, and it felt like this sort of mirrors in the first film in terms of the fact that my kids are grown and one of my kids is thinking about introducing his person to the family.”
Meet the Parents follows Stiller as Greg Focker, who meets his girlfriend Pam’s (Polo) parents Jack and Dina (De Niro and Danner) for the first time and intends to get their blessing to propose. Jack and Greg struggle to get along at first. Meet the Fockers featured the characters as they meet Greg’s parents (Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand), and Little Fockers revisits each of the characters years later while Greg and Pam raise two young sons.
“I’m looking forward to it. We’re gonna have a lot of fun,” De Niro said during the Tribeca Festival Q&A. “And the script is really good.”
