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KRISTEN
BELL is cute. Cute like a butterfly trinket on the end
of a charm bracelet. Cute like cotton candy wrapped in
marshmallows—covered with sparkly sugar crystals. Thank
God for her sailor mouth and acerbic sarcasm. Otherwise,
emo girls might’ve wiped that smile off her face by the
end of the eighth grade. As it happens, the 27-year-old
actress turned out to be something of a counterculture
icon, even if that world’s not really her cup of tea.
“If you
want to collect action figures, more [expletive] power
to ya, you know what I mean?” she muses, referring to
the legions of self-professed geeks who have embraced
Bell since her starring role as a smack-talking teen
detective on
Veronica Mars. It’s that juxtaposition
(cheerleader looks and an outsider’s attitude), she
says, that sets her apart from the bevy of blondes she
encounters at every audition. Including the one for the
role of
Sarah Marshall in Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
a new coming-of-age-as-you’re-pushing-30 comedy from
Judd Apatow’s gang.
“I think
I have a lot of tact, but I also think I was blessed
with a big personality, and I don’t think I need to hide
that or conform to anything, just because I’m supposed
to look like the girl next door,” she says on the phone
from Hawaii, where Sarah Marshall was filmed and where
she has been “forced” to return for the movie’s
publicity blitz.
It was
that big personality that prompted Bell’s mother to
enroll her in voice lessons and urged her, at age 11, to
try out for a youth theater production in her native
Detroit suburbs. She was cast as a banana and a tree in her first
community production, and by her senior year of high
school, she was applying for early admission to
New York University’s drama program.
She got
in, but never finished; Broadway got in the way of her
studies. Bell landed a role in the short-lived musical
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, then was cast opposite
Laura Linney and
Liam Neeson in a revival of The Crucible and
appeared in the
Kennedy Center’s
Stephen Sondheim festival.
At 22,
she moved to
Los Angeles, thinking, she says, “if I’m ever going to take a risk, it’s
going to be now.” But it didn’t turn out to be much of a
gamble: Three days after
Bell arrived, she was hired for a guest spot on The Shield.
One gig led to another, and in 2004 she was plucked from
the more than 500 women who auditioned for the title
role in Veronica Mars.
“It was
just luck, again, that [the show’s creator,
Rob Thomas saw that I have some sass in me, and
that’s exactly what he wanted. Someone that your first
impression of wasn’t going to be exactly what she
brought to the table. She may have looked a little
softer or sweeter, and when she opened her mouth, she
was just full of spitfire,” Bell says, seemingly of both
herself and her character.
The show
was praised by critics but canceled by network
executives after three seasons—and replaced with a
reality show searching for the next member of girl group
the
Pussycat Dolls. “Clearly it was an emergency in the
Pussycat Doll department,” Bell snaps.
But the
actress hasn’t exactly needed to file for unemployment.
In addition to Sarah Marshall, she narrates the hit
series Gossip Girl and has appeared in six
episodes of the sci-fi drama Heroes. Films that
will place her alongside the likes of
Meg Ryan and Anjelica Huston are also in the works.
In each
production, she will be pretty. Which is part of the
plan—and the facade.
“If I
looked like some dark, pierced chick, that would be
typical—of, like, the words that come out of my mouth,”
she explains. “It works to my advantage, because to
succeed in
Hollywood, I think you have to have something unexpected. Nobody wants
typical anymore.” |
