Kristen Bell Breaks Down Her Career, from 'Gossip Girl' to 'Frozen' | Vanity Fair

I would get feedback from an audition like well you're not pretty enough to play like the pretty girl but you're not like quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl and I was like okay so does that just mean like I can't be an actor like what does that mean that was what I was getting feedback on on every single audition hi I'm Kristen Bell and this is the timeline of my career looking for trouble should you be a bad Schuester don't think you're gonna bum me beer off of us either yeah I get your own I was living in Michigan and had already discovered my love of theater and music and acting so I was auditioning for anything I could get my hands on and this this movie called polish wedding came and shot in Detroit with Claire Danes and Gabriel Byrne and I was cast as like disgruntled teenager number one and I was very nervous but I was also incredibly excited and tried to keep my cool because at that time and still Claire Danes is just so worship worthy she's just such an incredible force but I tried to play it really chill yeah I had braces I was in the background I think we were like smoking and drinking on a street corner and that was my first film experience I just wanted to talk to him hey you wouldn't even come and see me he said he would come and see me in 2004 I was living in Los Angeles but I had trained theatrically in New York and this David Mamet movie came up and I spoke ma'am it he's one of those playwrights where you kind of have to know the way he writes it's very specific and I was like oh I would love to do that because I'm I'm in that world I've studied the way that he writes and I auditioned and I think I remember even though I had been in LA for like a year or two I remember saying to the casting director I just moved here from New York to try to appear more exotic and attractive I think I said that for a few years when I lived in LA I used to sit there the only reason I was allowed past the velvet ropes was Duncan Kane he used to be my boyfriend I did Veronica Mars right after I did Spartan we shot the pilot of Veronica Mars in San Diego the show got picked up and we shot for the next three years in San Diego and I commuted from Los Angeles to San Diego every Friday and Monday so Fridays we shot really late and I drove back to LA at around 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and then I left for work in San Diego at 4:00 in the morning on Sunday and I did that for three years which was difficult but I do feel like I earned my stripes on that show putting in a lot of a lot of effort my high school experience was different than Veronica's but every one every human being on the planet can relate to feeling like an outcast sometimes it's actually even the people that seem to fit in the most that feel the most left out and Veronica Mars was kind of where I discovered that I could do comedy because prior to that I was doing guest stars on TV shows and they were all really dark roles and I was very much like into acting and they just wrote these beautiful sassy one-liners on Veronica Mars that were the things you wish you said like when you get in bed at night and you sort of punch yourself and you go oh I should have said that to that guy that would have been the perfect singer you didn't know how to play poker but it must be really hard about you guys play [Music] that was the language Veronica Mars spoke in so it was very empowering to play this girl that was wise beyond her years and always fought for the underdog I think I discovered a lot about my personality and who I wanted to be through playing Veronica Harry ciders Gossip Girl here and I have the biggest news ever I'm a big fan of just saying what you need in a polite way and the CW had just cancelled Veronica Mars and I was saying oh okay I need to find a job and I had heard that they were doing this pilot called Gossip Girl and I realized that the cast was probably five years younger than I was at that time but there was a narrator and and that she was sort of a substantial portion of the show and I just called Don Ostroff and said hey so remember last week when you cancelled Veronica Mars can I just be this narrator and stay in business with you and she said yeah that sounds great let me check and then they offered me the part which was so much fun because I think that was the only role that I've never gotten a note on I walked in and they said just make this sassy and catty and we all know what that voice sounds like in her head and over the however many years I did that role I I don't think I ever got an adjustment I seem to be a part of these projects that keep coming back which I'm thrilled about because I've had a pretty good experience on every project I've worked on and I like the fact that it can be these reunions and we all get together again I don't know what the new Gossip Girl is going to be like or look like but I'm excited to to do it again dust off the old sassy voice Peter hey hi what are you doing here came here to murder you I did not actually read the script before I auditioned for Sarah Marshall I remember Judd Apatow was the biggest thing at that moment in comedy and everyone was planning to work with him because he was just producing such great material and I had gotten an audition at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning but I was shooting Veronica Mars in San Diego so I got the sides that I was to memorize on a Thursday night then I worked on Veronica Mars memorized it during my lunch break and then drove to Los Angeles on no sleep and just walked right into the audition room it was mostly a blackout for me because I was so tired but somehow managed to book that role and then when I finally ended up reading the script it was the same caliber that you're used to seeing from a Judd Apatow production and just fell in love with Jason Segel and Nick Stoller and Shauna Robertson all the people who made that movie beautiful and the funny thing about that was I was shooting Sarah Marshall in Hawaii and I got a call that Veronica Mars was going to be canceled it wasn't going to be picked up for another season and one day later I shot the scene where Sarah Marshall says my show has been canceled I'm washed up and I don't matter anymore so I was able to draw on a lot of personal feelings for that scene I'm really freaked out right now okay because seemingly the only actresses that actually can survive are the ones that show their cooter and excuse me but I refuse to do that I have a little dignity and I don't have the frame to support plastic surgery I would tip over and I'm not gonna do that I'm not going to exploit myself the cool thing about that movie I think I what I learned from that was I really gravitate towards playing characters who are inherently unlikable on the page and figuring out a way to get you to root for them because everybody has something likeable relatable identifiable about them even the people that are written like you know terrible human beings on a page and i when i read sarah's part I thought oh this girl she's you know her ego is huge she's a narcissist but she's still a human being and the way Jason Segel wrote that movie was so special because he gave his character a lot of character defects as well so there were reasons that you believed he and Sarah were falling apart but after that movie I sought out roles that had a lot more dimension in the characters please tell me I'm almost there does the air seem a bit thin to you up here I was only cast in that movie because I had auditioned for tangled and was not cast and the casting director Jamie Roberts had said you're not right for this but I think you're right for something else and right after my audition for tangled I sat down with Chris buck who is our director unfrozen and he said you know in about three years I'm gonna be doing this movie and it's gonna be called on and The Snow Queen and at that time it was something totally different and he stayed in contact with me I mean he's really the whole reason that I have this part he stayed in contact and they kind of built the role around me and asked us to share a lot of personal stories about how we wanted these two girls to interact to get a really strong real sisterly dynamic which is why I was able to make honest so spunky but I think what feels best about that movie is that because I was involved since its inception and was like the first one in cast I think that I was really able to shape that role into a love letter to my eleven year old so most princesses that you see on-screen or at least the ones that I did when I was 11 they weren't nearly as clumsy as I was they didn't talk too much they didn't wear their heart on their sleeve as much as I did and they just weren't as weird or quirky and I really wanted to represent all the little weirdos out there you know I mean I used to eat my dinner next to the dog like in a dog dish with my face when I was like five six seven years old so I was like I like my dog better than you guys I'm gonna eat down here like it's just you know a little off the beaten path [Music] all the cliches about parenting are true that's why they're so annoying and that's why they're cliches but there's parenting is really hard and I had just started to experience it and I got a call from Mila Kunis who is a friend and she said I'm doing this movie called bad moms and so are you and I was like okay great so she was the one who brought me onto the project she's like just trust me you'll read it you'll love it and she was right it poked fun at all the things that I was experiencing at that time but like drop off culture and how gross kids can be and it was everything I needed at that moment so I was very excited to be a part of that movie because I was going through those exact same things in my life whereas when I was doing Veronica Mars I was 25 years old playing 16 this was the project where I was actually experiencing all those things those moments and this sort of like mom vibe has very much become I think Who I am or at least what drives me with looking for roles that I guess show women in the forms of womanhood and motherhood simultaneously and yet that dissonance that can be there every person gets to live in a home that perfectly matches his or her true essence cool so I guess that's why my house for example is this adorable little cottage whereas other people might have homes that are bigger like that one exactly make sure and I met when I was 18 years old in the halls of Saturday Night Live where he was the head writer and where one of my friends was an intern in the set design department and I was like oh can I come with you and we had met a few times because we both were children there and then throughout the course of the next 15 years I'd run into him and I always just adored him and then when he started to create the best television out there with the office and parks and Brooklyn nine-nine I was always desperate to work for him but I didn't think he remembered me and then one night I got a call on my voicemail that said hey Kristen it's make sure I'm not sure if you remember me but I have this project and I I think you need to be a part of it and I was like freaking out and we sat down for lunch for like a four hour lunch and discovered we were both very preoccupied with what it means to be a good person so it was just like all these stars aligning of me finally being able to work with Mike getting the opportunity of my dreams having it be the subject matter of my dreams and living out the happiest four years I've had someone else but also more yourself than you've ever felt this was the brainchild of a documentarian named Jason Cohen who came to Will Gluck at Olive Bridge entertainment and said I have this crazy idea and I just want to reunite musical theater casts because I've pulled people and in any room 95% of the people were a part of their high school musical theater and especially right now there are very few things that bring us all together that we've all experienced right we always talk about how much we disagree in America or on earth I'm different because of this thing we all know what high school feels like right everyone has that pit in their stomach when we say high school and almost everyone was a part of their theater show so we thought what if we reunite Millennials and baby boomers and just capture that spark of reintroducing yourself to someone you already know and the show actually turned out better than we thought because there's this electricity when you see people who can relive moments from their high school better they almost have that Veronica Mars ability because it's a human story more than it is about musical theater but people have made amends or stood up for themselves rekindled love come out of the closet it's like all these beautiful things wrapped up in one and I'm very very proud of it it's funny I was so concerned with acting in the beginning of my career and I feel like as it's gone on non scripted television that tells more human interest stories is what I have been gravitating towards the last couple years hello Bello came out of this idea that my husband and I had where we both grew up in Michigan but when we had kids we could walk into any boutique and buy any baby product we felt was great for our baby and not look at the price tag and we just in the pit of our stomach knew that was unfair and we wanted to fill a void in the market where you could bring sort of premium products to all parents they wouldn't have to choose between their baby and their budget and I think one thing I've learned is that I've always seen problems in the world but now that I have this career I realize I can be leveraged I can walk into a company and say I see a problem in the marketplace and I would like to fix it and you can fix it with this and you can say Dax and I are involved and we will have integrity behind the mission and it will be a good company and it has so far I mean we've just turned a year but we've given over a million diapers away and to 70 different organizations we made sure going in that we have a 20% first responder discount like all of these things that in might when I'm going to bed at night I want to see happen in the world I'm able to leverage because of having done some movies and television and the company doesn't go away like the movies or TV does so we just turned a year old and we're celebrating by we're giving parents expecting or new in America and Canada a free pack of diapers like on us and every day that I sort of live that mission through this company I feel more and more excited to take on more business opportunities I don't want to say less acting but if this where was where my career ended acting wise I think I'd be okay with it I remember early on getting feedback that I wasn't enough in either category like I would get feedback from an audition like well you're not pretty enough to play like the pretty girl but you're not like quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl and I was like okay so does that just mean like I can't be an actor like what does that mean that was what I was getting feedback on on every single audition but I think as I've grown older those boxes have changed and they've almost gone away and it's like this huge gray area now of all these beautiful stories that you can tell that have dimensional people that don't have to be one thing it's not the 80s where you have to have the popular girl and then the nerd who gets the guy like it's not that anymore and I'm really grateful for that and I think it opens up a lot of opportunities for everyone to play and pretend which is the most fun part

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 3,096,856

Rating: 4.9693198 out of 5

Keywords: kristen bell, career timeline, kristen bell vanity fair, career timeline vanity fair, vanity fair career timeline, kristen bell career timeline, kristen bell career, kristen bell interview, kristen bell roles, frozen, kristen bell frozen, kristen bell anna, gossip girl, veronica mars, hello bello, kristen bell hello bello, kristen bell dax shepard, forgetting sarah marshall, bad moms, the good place, kristen bell the good place, anna frozen, vanity fair

Id: Yj2dr_bpYyU

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/set_phrases_to_stun]

How could they skip over Heroes?! That was actually my first exposure to Kristen, so I was really curious what she had to say. :(

[u/lheidler3]

Kristin Bell is a national treasure.

[u/Yeh_vaada_raha]

We really deserve season 5 after the pandemic is over!

Please come through for us Rob and Kristen!

[u/llieno94]

They did Gracie’s Choice dirty, not even putting it on the timeline. Wonder why? It had Anne Heche in it and I think Kristen got a nom for a Young Artist Award or something.

Still one of the only good lifetime movies I’ve seen

[u/itsmhuang]

How dare they say she wasn’t pretty enough to play the pretty character but also not quirky enough to play the quirky character. Excuse me, Kristen is gorgeous weirdo.

[u/helen_tarnation]

/u/vredditshare