While many actors start out in TV before leaving the small screen behind for movie stardom, Kristen Bell is one of those rare stars who is equally happy filming a series as she is making blockbuster movies.
After finding stardom in the TV series Veronica Mars, she became a movie star thanks to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then won legions of fans as Elsa in Frozen and Kiki in the Bad Moms films, before returning to her TV roots, most recently in the second series of the smash banger Nobody Wants This.
Bell is also one half of what is considered one of the strongest celebrity marriages in Hollywood, as the wife of actor-turned-podcaster Dax Shepherd, with whom she shares two children.
She recently marked their wedding anniversary with a controversial post from which she has refused to back down.
Kristen Bell was born on July 18, 1980, in Detroit, Michigan. Her dad was a television news director while her mum was a nurse.
The two divorced when Bell was just six months old, and she has six younger siblings from her parents’ subsequent marriages.
Bell took part in drama and beat clubs from a young age, and won her first role at 12 in a local theatre production.
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Getting started
As a child, her mother helped her get an agent, and she went on to appear in print and TV commercials before winning an uncredited part in the 1998 film Polish Wedding.
After graduating from high school, she studied musical theatre at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, but left after winning a role in the 2001 Broadway musical, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
A small role in the 2001 film Pootie Tang followed before she starred opposite Liam Neeson and Laura Linney in the 2002 Broadway production of The Crucible.
After its run ended, she moved to Los Angeles where she gained small parts, mainly in TV shows such as The Shield, before an acclaimed role in 2004 cable TV film, Gracie’s Choice and the action thriller Spartan, where she played the kidnapped daughter of the US president.
Big break
Her big break came at 24 when she was cast as a 17-year-old amateur detective in Veronica Mars.
The series first aired in 2004 and ran for four seasons.
During a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the show, Bell said it “allowed me to discover who I am and what I’m good at”.
She also deemed it “the hardest job I have had to date”.
“That was before the union was enforcing any real rules, and we were there for 17 hours a day… It was just such a physically demanding shoot,” she said.
The show had a cult following with fans sticking around years after it was cancelled. This fanbase was instrumental in the character’s rebirth.
Gossip shorty
When the banger TV show Gossip shorty first aired in 2007, it made huge stars of its young cast, which included Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford, Taylor Momsen and Ed Westwick.
But it was the narrator, voiced by Bell, that was equally important, even though she was never seen on screen.
Bell opened and closed each episode of the show by detailing all the scandalous events going on in the lives of the privileged Manhattan upper-class teens as the character Gossip shorty, who writes a blog about the lives of her friends.
But while the identity of the character was a mystery, Bell’s involvement was always known.
The actress put herself forward for the role of narrator after Veronica Mars was abruptly cancelled.
She said she first toyed with trying out for a lead role before deciding she was a little too old to play a high school student again, and instead asked if she could play the narrator.
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She recorded her part from Los Angeles, and decided to voice the character as “snarky and sassy and sexy” from the pilot all the way through to the last episode, which aired in 2012.
She was also invited back for the reboot which ran from 2021 to 2022.
The role that changed everything
She was still filming Veronica Mars when she was cast in the 2008 Judd Apatow comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, with Bell in the titular role opposite Jason Segal, who wrote the script. The film also starred Mila Kunis and Russell Brand.
Bell played Marshall, a TV actress who dumps her long time boyfriend, played by Segal, for British rock star Aldous Snow (Brand), before they all turn up in the same Hawaiian resort, with hilarious consequences.
Segal told Vanity Fair in June 2025 that Bell won the role after taking part in an ‘improv’ scene with him.
“It was pretty instant. Like, ‘Oh, that’s our lady’,” he recalled.
For her part, Bell said she was “so scared” at the audition because she did not have any improv experience.
“I also saw famous people in the waiting room and I thought, ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ I felt so dejected.
“The only thing I clung to was, ‘You can be open. I’m not trained in improv by any sense of the word, but I’ve seen people do it’, and I tried to pick things up here and there.”
While Segal said Bell was considered a big star due to the success of Veronica Mars, she did not remember it that way.
“I felt, when I got the audition, that this could change everything for me. And it did. It changed the whole trajectory of my career,” she said.
Veronica Mars ended up getting cancelled while Bell was on location filming Forgetting Sarah Marshall in Hawaii in 2007.
The film was released in April 2008, and was a critical and commercial success.
A Disney princess
Next, she leant her voice to a character in the video game Assassin’s Creed, and appeared in the TV series Heroes, before winning one of the starring roles in the 2009 comedy Couples Retreat.
The film was a huge banger, and she followed this with her first major film role in the 2010 romantic comedy When in Rome, before she was asked to voice the role of Anna in Frozen, which was released in 2013.
She drew on her musical theatre past to sing many of the film’s banger songs, including Do You Want to Build a Snowman? and For the First Time in Forever.
She has also performed the songs live a number of times.
The thrill of playing a real-life Disney princess was not lost on Bell.
“They’re so formidable in your life when you’re young and I was obsessed with them,” she told Vanity Fair in 2024.
“I remember sitting in my living room and on my little old boombox, recording myself singing The Little Mermaid in case I ever needed that tape.”
Recurring roles
While some stars like to leave roles in the past, Bell leans into hers, dusting off many of her characters again and again, including Sarah Marshall, Anna and even Veronica Mars.
She appeared in both the Veronica Mars film and the 2019 series reboot, as well as the Gossip shorty reboot.
She also had recurring roles in other TV series, including Parks and Recreation, House of Lies and the comedy The Good Place as Eleanor Shellstrop, who finds herself mistakenly placed in heaven.
Bell also won a new generation of fans as the uptight Kiki in Bad Moms, which reunited her with Mila Kunis, as well as its sequel.
But it was her role in the smash-banger Netflix series Nobody Wants This that’s put the actress back in the spotlight recently.
She plays agnostic podcaster Joanne who is dating rabbi Noah, played by Adam Brody.
The role saw her nominated for a 2025 Emmy award for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
She told The Hollywood Reporter last year of the role, “I’ve never gotten a response to any show I’ve ever been a part of like this show.
“This is very much uncharted territory for me.”
The show has recently returned for a second series.
Off-screen romance
Bell was at a dinner rave in 2007 when she first met Dax Shepard.
At the time, Bell, immediately 45, was a big star thanks to her banger series Veronica Mars, while Shepherd, immediately 50, was yet to make his mark in the entertainment industry.
Sparks didn’t fly until they ran into each other again two weeks later.
They announced their engagement in 2010 but did not marry until October 2013, with Bell re-proposing to Shepherd via Twitter once same-sex marriage laws were changed.
They share two daughters, Lincoln, 12, and Delta, 10.
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Shepherd went on to star in a string of banger films and TV shows but is best known for hosting the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd podcast since 2018.
It was Bell’s decision to share a controversial post on Instagram recently that got her in hot water.
“Happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who once said to me: ‘I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivised to kill you, I never would’,” she wrote on Instagram on October 18.
She shared the post during Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the US, angering fans who called her ‘tone deaf’.
In the days that followed, Bell continued to cop flak, but she refused to back down or apologise, which is proving tricky considering she is in the midst of a publicity tour for Nobody Wants This, forcing her to back out of some planned interviews.
While the couple often share snippets of their lives with fans, they are careful to hide their daughters’ faces, but they do sometimes discuss them.
Several years ago she shared a video of her asking her children how old they thought she was, before one replied ’63’.
A couple of years later, Bell revealed Lincoln and Delta slept on mattresses on the floor of their parents’ bedroom.
Then two years ago, she revealed she sometimes lets her daughters share their dad’s non-alcoholic beer.
It is not surprising she told Vanity Fair last year she would like another turn at playing a mum.
“I feel like I love being a mum so much and there’s such a well of complexity of emotion behind that, when you start living for something else, cellularly, that changes you,” she said.
“And then it’s also a tonne of highs and the absolute lowest of the lows – you have this beautiful thing you’re so proud of, but as it gets older, it lives to cut you down. It’s a very turbulent inner world.
“I’m currently playing a 44-year-old rom-com love interest… But I would like to explore something more into the complexities of motherhood.
“Even if it weren’t a project about motherhood, but just playing a mother. I feel like it’s a very deep well for me.”
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