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“How are you?” has become a loaded question during the worst global pandemic in a century. Sometimes I say “Fine?”—emphasis on the question mark—when I really mean “Hanging by a thread” or, to borrow the title of author and reluctant grief expert Nora McInerny’s podcast, “Terrible, thanks for asking.” It’s loaded in casual, masked conversation, in fumbling, awkward emails, and also when Zooming with Kristen Bell at 6:15 p.m. Los Angeles time on a Tuesday night in late March.
How is Bell, actor, producer, and the somewhat rare not-annoying mom influencer/purveyor of CBD skin-care? “I am currently fulfilled,” she replies with a nod from the set of her new Netflix miniseries, the dark comedy-thriller The Woman in the House. Bell is eating a sandwich in her trailer (6:15 p.m. is lunch when you film until the wee hours) and wearing a caramel-colored bang hairpiece. “Going back to work was a little nerve-wracking,” Bell tells me, but it was necessary for her sense of balance—a word she hates but that seems unavoidable when talking about mothers and their careers. Like millions of parents across the country, “I was in my house for one year with a six- and a seven-year-old”—her daughters Delta and Lincoln with husband Dax Shepard (as everyone who tracks their life like a reality show well knows).
But Bell isn’t one to leave it at that, allowing any reader of this story to think she’s a perfectly cute super celebrity, the actor behind Veronica Mars, Sarah Marshall, Gossip Girl, and the unmistakably chipper Anna from Frozen. Bell acknowledges she had the privilege of sheltering in a luxurious space. “I say to [my kids] all the time, ‘I’m not saying you can’t complain. You’re allowed to have any feeling you want, and you’re allowed to sit in it for as long as you need. But when you’re done, I just need you to remember,’” she says, “‘we have the luckiest life you have ever heard of. You have a swimming pool in your backyard.’” But she is also one of the millions of people for whom the pandemic, in all of its uncertainty and tragedy, exacerbated existing mental health issues.
“I know that I present someone who is very bubbly and happy all the time, and a lot of the time I am, because I have really good tools,” she tells me. “But there are definitely days when the alarm goes off and I go, ‘No, I’m staying right here. Nothing’s worth it…. I’m just going to stay in this cocoon because I need to; because I feel very, very, very vulnerable.’”
Bell’s anxiety and depression came in waves during the long, dark valley of COVID-19. “I have trouble distinguishing between my emotions and someone else’s emotions, and that’s not a compliment to myself. That’s a very dangerous thing to toy with,” she explains. Consuming the endlessly heavy news took her to a “mental zone that wasn’t healthy for my family to be around.” Shepard confronted Bell in a way that certainly wouldn’t be right for everyone but that she reflects on as a turning point. “‘Hey, real quick, are you helping anyone right now by sitting and crying in your bed, or are you just being self-indulgent?’” Bell remembers him saying. “‘Either get up and donate money or donate your time or do something to help, or take that story in, give it some love, and come out here and be a good mom and a good wife and a good friend and live your life in honor of the suffering that happens in the world.’” Bell had an understandable response: “‘How dare you?’ But also, ‘You’re right.’” So she gave blood to the UCLA Blood & Platelet Center and made a donation to No Kid Hungry.
Bell, who turns 41 in July, has experienced anxiety and depression since age 18, when she left her native Michigan to study acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Why do I feel terrible and exhausted every day?” she asked herself then. “I wasn’t suicidal…. It was just a generalized dark cloud over me. I felt like my real personality was in a tiny cage inside my body.” Her mom, Lorelei, a registered nurse, had already pulled her aside to tell her about a hereditary component: Both Lorelei and Bell’s grandmother experienced anxiety and depression too. Lorelei dispelled any sense of shame or stigma, including about medication, asking Bell to consider why she was denying herself medication that could truly help her. (Bell has spoken about taking daily SSRI medications.)
Exercise is also chief among the aforementioned “good tools” that get Bell through, ever since college, when she started walking around New York City. She says exercising helps keep her patient and happy. In January she shared a slightly sweaty, makeup-free pic of herself on Instagram: “I’ve been struggling the last 2 weeks, for who-knows-why-slash-ALL-the-reasons. Today I finally got back on the treadmill, figuratively and literally. And I’m proud,” she wrote. “To anyone who’s been feeling the same, you can do it.”
Bell makes her days feel more manageable with a meditation borrowed from Anna, her Frozen alter ego: “Do the next right thing.” Often that means telling herself, “Get your ass up and go walk around the block.” Relatably, she goes through workout phases: L.A.-based studio Metamorphosis, a Pilates and circuit training mashup, is a favorite. During quarantine Bell relied on trainer Charlie Curtis (conveniently, he’s a friend and a member of her pandemic pod) and Indoorphins, his at-home nonintimidating yet high-intensity classes. Bell also employs the grand-millennial coping tactics of knitting and puzzling. “I puzzle a lot because I find it to be the best way to get people to stop talking to you,” she says matter-of-factly. It gives the multihyphenate and multitasker a much-needed mental break from said pod (which also includes Ryan Hansen, who played the fratty Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars), on top of acting, producing, and hatching Happy Dance, her CBD product line. If you crave theories on the broad appeal of puzzling in the pandemic, Bell is happy to oblige: You don’t look at your phone, there’s no deadline, stakes, or room for creativity. Most of all, puzzles bring a semblance of order to a world of chaos: “There’s a place for each piece.”
Bell comes off like a natural sharer. She is a woman who once divulged on The Talk that her kids walked in on her and Shepard having sex. Shepard’s gassiness also comes up in the course of our Zoom session. Still, I think aloud that she doesn’t have to post her low moments to Instagram, or air them with me, an ostensible stranger. She could just let fans and followers believe the sprightly, superficial version of her. “You do, though,” Bell disagrees. “You have a responsibility…to try and make the world a safer, better place for other human beings.” Sometimes, Bell admits, “I still have this desire, this knee-jerk, to present perfection.” Enter Shepard, who consistently checks her, asking: “Are you being honest? Are you telling the whole story?”
There comes a place in almost every profile about Bell that revels in the opposites-attract dynamic of her marriage to Shepard. Bell is cast as the pert, Catholic school-educated “good girl” who—clutch pearls here—somehow ended up on the back of a motorcycle on a cross-country road trip with fellow Detroit native Shepard, the prototypical bad boy and Punk’d prankster whose past days-long benders blew her mind. I have to wonder if this Sandy Olsson–Danny Zuko narrative lacks nuance.
Bell laughs and tells me it’s not entirely wrong. She herself once told Esquire that “you couldn’t find two more extremes,” adding, “I don’t know if I’ve even seen cocaine at a party, let alone done it.” But that was back in 2012, the year before Bell and Shepard got married in a $142 ceremony at a Beverly Hills courthouse; they’d been together for five years but didn’t want to marry until their partnered same-sex friends gained the same legal right.
Seven years later, “if we’re going to talk about who’s forced who to grow, I will give him the credit,” Bell tells me. Shepard “elevates vulnerability to an obsessive level.” He is the one who first urged Bell to speak publicly about her mental health issues, and about the fact that, although like Barack and Michelle Obama, they are hailed as #relationshipgoals—they do face masks together in bed! He once gifted her a birthday visit from a sloth, her favorite animal!—they also do stints in couples therapy and have gotten into at least one fight so bad they both “blacked out,” she said on the podcast Life Is Short With Justin Long. “I don’t want any young person feeling like there’s a fantasy out there that they just have to find the right person,” she says as she sums up Shepard’s philosophy, continuing to describe his takeaways: “That’s not how humans work. People change. People grow.” Marriage is much more complicated than “‘I just haven’t found my perfect piece,’” Bell says, “because relationships aren’t a puzzle. You cannot pick them up and put them down. Are you loving this puzzle through line?"
Bell and Shepard reentered couples therapy just before the pandemic hit. “My husband and I, we were just at each other’s throats,” she remembers. “It’s so obvious now, that every two years, you have to go back.” Thanks to that refresh, Bell and Shepard “didn’t kill each other in the beginning.” But the couple found themselves at another difficult place when Shepard, who was 16 years sober from alcohol, opioids, and cocaine, briefly relapsed over the summer, taking painkillers after a motorcycle accident. “We realized, ‘Okay, our math wasn’t working,’” Bell says. “I mean, he admitted it so quickly. It was like, ‘I did something that I don’t want to do. I’m going down a bad road. I want help. I want your help,’ and I looked at him and I said, ‘Okay, you come up with the new math.’”
Shepard subsequently gave Bell “full... control’s not the right word,” she says. “Full privilege, maybe, to call him on anything.” After relapsing, Bell says, Shepard told her: “You can drug-test me whenever you want. I’m going to buy some tests. I’m going to have them in the house. If you ever feel nervous, I want you to have access to this and I’ll do it, no questions asked.” According to Bell, Shepard wanted the safety net of knowing that, at any moment, he could be tested. Bell didn’t balk. Her response: “Maybe, some day. Why not?” When I ask her about the impact of being married to someone with substance-use issues—she has in the past been skewered online for smoking weed around Shepard—Bell praises Shepard. “He’s just good at trying, and that’s all you can ask of anyone. No one’s perfect,” she adds. “He's proven to me that he is committed to evolving and he loves personal growth.” As she told Ellen DeGeneres of Shepard’s relapse last October: “Everybody’s up against their own demons. Sometimes it’s anxiety and depression, sometimes it’s substance abuse.”
The pandemic dealt a blow to many couples’ sex lives, but Bell and Shepard aren’t among them. They still regularly schedule sex: “There are some times when it’s in the calendar. You're like, ‘I know you’re tired, but it’s been two weeks, so we really got to get to it.” Bell says she remains turned on by Shepard’s sense of humor, whether he’s filling his cooling mattress pad with water “because he runs hot, like a silverback, at night,” or buying a safe for his toiletries, ranting (in a kind of cute way) about how his family members steal his nail clippers. “The stupid shit he does just by being him is so attractive to me,” says Bell, who has a deliciously blunt, sometimes blue, streak. “The beautiful thing about him is he finds the comedy in everything.”
Both Bell’s and Shepard’s parents are divorced—many times on each side, she says—but the couple is determined to have a different outcome. “Do you want to be on the porch with someone when you’re 80?” Bell asks. “We both want that.” And so they don’t just share openly with the world, but with each other, too. “He can tell me someone he finds attractive, female or male, ’cause he pauses the Olympics on a lot of runners,” Bell says, “but it doesn’t make me feel like he’s going to leave me for that person because I’m not allowing my self-esteem to be affected. I know there are people on Planet Earth that are more attractive than me, and well, we’re not dead. I have to acknowledge we’re monkeys.” When Bell and Shepard were watching Friday Night Lights, for instance: “We were moments away from picking up the phone and asking both Minka Kelly and Taylor Kitsch if they wanted to join our marriage.”
As white parents, Bell and Shepard are united in a mission to raise socially conscious, antiracist kids in the privileged bubble of Hollywood. Over the past year she and Shepard showed their daughters pictures of Black Lives Matter uprisings in L.A. and anti-mask riots in Michigan, then asked them to notice the differences. They’ve renamed the game of hangman at their home after Bell explained what lynching is, “and that is terrible,’” she said to them, “‘and that’s one of the reasons that the Black Lives Matter movement exists and is important.’” Instead they call the game “Full-man.” When it comes to how they give their children perspective on their privilege in the world, Bell’s stance is clear: “Be super fucking honest with them.”
Bell is unassuming about it, but if you stop to consider her career, she is a bonafide pop cultural force, from the multibillion-dollar Frozen franchise to a string of $100-million-box-office movies like Bad Moms and, once upon a time, Forgetting Sarah Marshall; spiky starring turns on The Good Place and House of Lies and an ambassador deal with Neutrogena. When Bell first met Shepard, the Punk’d star said he outearned her. Now Bell outearns him. “Can I tell you something?” Bell says, dropping into sotto voce. “I think I’ve always outearned him.”
Being the breadwinner as a woman still defies the societal and marital norm, but Bell doesn’t really “have the desire to walk [Shepard] through his feelings about it,” she says, showcasing some of the bite that pops up in her onscreen roles. “He can get over it.” Providing for her family is a source of self-esteem, but Bell says she doesn’t think about it often: “I got a lot of opportunity, you’re sharing in it, we’re able to provide for a ton of our family members who may or may not be struggling,” she says, as if addressing Shepard. Plus, she doesn’t divvy up the money in her head—nor does the couple have a prenup: “I don’t look at it like, ‘This is mine and this is yours.’ I’m like, ‘This is ours. Get over it.’”
Bell backpedals a smidge. Of course, “I would talk to him about it if he felt emasculated, but… certainly, it’s not on my list to be like, ‘Let me make sure he’s okay.’” As Bell sums up her career: “I have had a shit ton of opportunity. I’ve also worked my ass off.”
Bell has been a name since her breakout role on Veronica Mars in 2004, a cult series that wormed its way deep into fans’ hearts. So deep that the so-called Marshmallows crowdfunded the $5.7 million budget for the 2014 film adaptation. She maintains she’d play Veronica forever. “I never want to say her journey’s over. I would play her until she’s Murder She Wrote, and we do some cool twists where you realize she’s been killing everybody and I’m the only one left,” Bell says. “If people are really like, ‘We want Veronica back,’ then, great, I’ll totally do it. But that’s going to have to come from them, and we will patiently wait, biting our nails.” Even so, evolving the fictional world of Neptune, California, has already posed creative challenges. “There’s only so long you can play out a love affair…and let me tell you, people were angry that we killed Logan,” Bell says. “I’m still proud of the way that we did it. I thought we matured it. Same thing with Frozen II.”
Thirteen years after first lending her tart soprano’s voice to Gossip Girl’s now iconic voiceovers, she will return for the forthcoming HBO Max reboot. “I’m a loyal friend. It’s silly, but it is true. I have a sincere respect for the things that helped me get where I am,” she says. “I could have said no, but the reality is, it’s a pretty easy job.”
After almost two decades in Hollywood, Bell has seen some things when it comes to the rot of sexism and misogyny in Hollywood, though she feels she’s generally escaped unscathed. “I’ve been very lucky that I’ve never been treated with immense disrespect,” she says. Bell has, however, been “deprioritized and felt like, Oh, it’s because I’m a girl,” and struggled with being assertive at work: “We call it leaning in now. We don’t call it bossy anymore, but I’m pretty bossy,” she says. “I’m a very active presence on set. I’m all up in the director’s grill: ‘What are we getting? Can I see the shot?’” Bell is an executive producer on The Woman in the House, as she was on Veronica Mars and others.
She’s reached the age when women actors see leading roles start to dwindle, but Bell marvels: “I feel so grateful for the place I am now. I have bigger opportunities that I never thought I’d have in my life,” including the freedom to choose her projects instead of waiting for whatever she gets, or “hammering auditions.” But Bell still reads for things, and she’s determined to never take her career “so seriously that I think it deserves to be mine, because I think that’s the moment it will go away.” She loves a Twitter bio she saw at some point that read, “Everything deserves to be loved and everything deserves to be made fun of.” It’s not just Shepard who checks her; she’s been known to poke at her ego, telling herself: “Careful, you’re not curing cancer.’”
But the pandemic also infused Bell with a newfound respect for the role of entertainment, as people stuck at home, isolated and perhaps struggling like she was, found sparks of joy in bingeing Veronica Mars or The Good Place or therapeutically belting the Frozen II soundtrack at top volume. “I’ve been a part of some fluff, and it’s awesome,” she said, but that so-called fluff has perhaps never been more meaningful. Just as exercise and puzzling helped her cope, Bell’s sparkly canon helped people through the darkest of times. “Hearing that,” she said, “made my heart grow 10 sizes.”
