A son of Newton Ivan Steers, Jr. (1917 - 1993), a Republican congressman from Maryland, and Nina Gore Auchincloss (born 1935), a stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and a half-sister of the writer Gore Vidal, Steers has had minor roles in a few of Quentin Tarantino's films, playing Roger (or "Flock of seagulls") in Pulp Fiction and providing one of the radio voices in Reservoir Dogs. He also has appeared in The Last Days of Disco, Fix and Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid.
 
 He wrote and directed Igby Goes Down in 2002, an acidic urban coming of age film that starred Kieran Culkin and Susan Sarandon. Steers also was the screenwriter of the film How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which starred Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. He has directed episodes of the television series Weeds, The L Word, and Big Love.
 
 His brother Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963 - 1995) was an American figurative painter whose later works often focused on AIDS as a theme. He has another brother, Ivan Steers, and five stepsiblings from his mother's second marriage to Michael Straight, an editor of The New Republic who also was part of the Cambridge Five, a Soviet spy ring of the 1930s whose members included Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean. He is married to Jennifer Bott, an attorney, whom he met at a political fundraiser in the early 1990s.
 
 His great grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, served as Oklahoma's first Democratic senator from 1907 until 1921 and from 1931 until 1937.
 
 His maternal great-grandfather Oliver B. Jennings was a founder of Standard Oil.