But you're not, like, quirky enough for 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 every single audition.

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell, and this is the timeline of my career Looking for trouble?

Bed Schuster.

Don't think you're gonna bump me beer off of us either.

You get your own.

I was living in Michigan and, uh, had already discovered my love of theater and music and acting's Why was auditioning for anything I could get my hands on and this'll 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 of that time.

And still, Claire Danes is just so worship worthy.

She's just such an incredible force that 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.

You wouldn't even 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 Mamet.

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 L.

A 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 L.

A.

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 L.

A.

At around seven or eight in the morning.

And then I left for work in San Diego at four in the morning on Sunday.

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 everyone, every human being on the planet, I 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 rolls 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, you go.

Oh, I should have said that to that guy.

That would've been the perfect singer.

You know how to play poker?

No, it must be really hard for you guys.

Play.

That was language.

Veronica Mars spoken.

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.

I'm a big fan of just saying what you need in a polite way.

And the CW had just canceled Veronica Mars and I was saying, Oh, okay.

And I need to find a job.

And I had I 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 Dawn Ostroff and said, Hey, so remember last week when you canceled 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 our head.

And over the however many years I did that role, I don't think I ever gotten 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 could be these reunions, and we all get together again.

Um, I don't know what the new gossip girl is going to be like or look like, but I'm excited to do it again.

Dust off the old, sassy voice.

Peter.

Hey.

Hi.

What are you doing here?

I 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 pining 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 were used to seeing from a Judd Apatow production and just fell in love with Jason Siegel 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 cancelled.

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 explain the cool thing about that movie.

I think what I learned from that waas 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 Sara'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 Segal wrote that movie was so special cause 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.

Oh, please tell me I'm almost there here seem a bit thin to you up here.

I was only casting 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 on frozen.

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 roll 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 it 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 1st 1 cast, I think that I was really able to shave that roll into a love letter to my 11 year old self.

Most princess is 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 waas.

They didn't talked too much.

They didn't wear their hearts on their sleeve as much as I did, and they just weren't as weird quirky.

And I really wanted to represent all the little weirdoes 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 567 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.

All the cliches about parenting or 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 Meal Kunis, who is a friend, and she said, I'm doing this movie called Bad Moms and so were 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 the 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 at 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 could 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.

Like 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 in Brooklyn 99 I was always desperate toe work for him, but I didn't think he remembered me.

And then one night I got a call on my voice mail that said, Hey, Kristen, it's make sure I'm not sure if you remember me, but I have this project and 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 feels like 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 are on Earth.

I'm different cause 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 captured that spark of re introducing 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 by 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 so 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 just turned a year, but we've given over a 1,000,000 diapers away and to 70 different organizations.

We made sure going in that we have a 20% 1st responder discount.