The instant stardom enjoyed by many up-and-comers in film and television thanks to the rise of streaming platforms is not exactly familiar to Kristen Bell, 45. Having grown up in front of the cameras, starting out in commercials on local television, the actress’s career is the result of perseverance rather than luck, of believing in herself despite mounting rejections, and of maintaining a distance from fame to gain perspective.
While she has worked steadily since the outset, it is in recent years that her career has received particular acclaim, both from the public and critics. Last year, she was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2025, and her role in the romantic series Nobody Wants This, one of Netflix’s recent hits, played a significant part in that recognition. The series, which premiered in the fall of 2024, boosted her popularity and once again positioned her as one of the leading television actresses of the moment after several years of minor projects.
Last Sunday, Bell hosted the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards), a precursor to the Oscars, marking her third time hosting the ceremony. Her debut was in 2018, the first year the awards had used a host. she also hosted last year, when she was also nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy Series. In addition to this, she’s preparing to film the third season of Nobody Wants This, which is scheduled for release this year, and rehearsing for the musical Three Months Later, which will premiere in Los Angeles. “I’m in like full throttle bad boss mode. Well, not a bad boss. More like a worker bee,” she joked in an interview with Variety on February 22.
Getting to where she is now hasn’t been easy. Bell wasn’t born into a family of artists, she didn’t have a mentor in the industry, nor any connections to help launch her acting career. Her mother, of Polish descent, was a nurse, and her father was a news director at a local television station. Her interest in acting began in her school’s drama club, where she landed the lead role of Dorothy in the musical The Wizard of Oz. This is significant because that role, which also requires singing, speaks volumes about Bell’s career: a versatile actress who, in her early days, had a strong interest in musicals.
Her first appearances on camera, aside from the commercials she did as a child, were minor roles, some practically as an extra and others with just a brief line. But Bell had big dreams, so she decided to move to Manhattan to study musical theater at the Tisch School of the Arts, the performing arts school of New York University. In 2001, when she was about to graduate, she left university to work on a Broadway musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. A year later, she landed a small role in the adaptation of The Crucible, with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney. Even so, opportunities weren’t fully opening up for the young actress, who decided to settle in Los Angeles in 2002.
After numerous rejections at auditions and sporadic appearances in television series, at 24, her life finally changed. Bell was chosen to star in Veronica Mars, a teen thriller series in which she played a private investigator. The show aired from 2004 to 2007 and built a fan community that was key to releasing the sequel as a film in 2014. Bell herself and Rob Thomas, the series creator, launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance the film. Fans responded enthusiastically, and in less than 10 hours, the fundraising goal of $2 million was reached. In 2019, Hulu released another sequel with eight new episodes.
“I’m very grateful for that project. It allowed me to discover who I am and what I’m good at. It allowed me to discover my flow as a performer. It was also the hardest job I’ve had to date. It was before the union was enforcing any real rules, and we were there for 17 hours a day […] It was a hard and physically demanding shoot,” she revealed when asked about the series in 2024, the 20th anniversary of the first episode.
While that role remains one of the actress’s most memorable, after the original series ended, she explored other genres with films like Burlesque (2010), a musical starring Cher and Christina Aguilera. However, it is comedy that has allowed her to connect with audiences.
In this regard, she shines in films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), produced by Judd Apatow, and in the series The Good Place (2016). The latter, which aired until January 2020, earned her a first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Eleanor Shellstrop. Her second nomination at the prestigious awards came in 2025, following the success of Nobody Wants This.
After a few years of rather forgettable projects, she made a triumphant return with the role of Joanne in the romantic comedy, where she shares the screen with (and kisses) Adam Brody, who plays Rabbi Noah. The show immediately became one of Netflix’s most-watched and ushered in a new phase in the actress’s career.
‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Frozen,’ Bell’s other (unsung) successes
In some of the most prominent titles in her filmography, Bell is credited not as an actress, but as a voice actress. She provides the voice of Anna in the Frozen films (the third instalment is currently in production and the fourth has already been confirmed). Furthermore, in her role as a singer, she performed Do You Want to Build a Snowman? from the film’s soundtrack, a track that has amassed over 421 million streams on Spotify.
Aside from participating in the Disney blockbuster, her voice was also key in one of the most emblematic series of the 2000s: Gossip Girl. Bell was present in every episode as the voice-over narrator for the five years the series ran, from 2007 to 2012. She reprised the role in the 2021 reboot.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, she recounted how she became the omnipresent voice of the popular teen drama: “Gossip Girl had just gotten greenlit, and I realized I was probably five or 10 years too old to audition for some of these parts. So I called the head of The CW [the network that aired Veronica Mars] at the time and said, ‘Hey, remember yesterday when you canceled my show? Can I be the narrator on this other show?’ And thankfully there was enough goodwill there that she game me a chance.”
As a voice actress, she can also be heard in video games such as Assassin’s Creed and other children’s titles such as Ralph Breaks the Internet, Zootopia or Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie.
Her professional commitments are almost endless. Even so, the multifaceted actress has made it clear many times that, in her case, work takes a backseat to family: “I really do turn off my phone at five o’clock. That’s a non-negotiable for me. So I rush, rush, rush during the day to try to get all these things done because when my kids get home and we’re all off work and the family is together, my phone goes into another room and we make dinner and watch a movie. Tonight, we’re watching Cast Away.” she explained in the aforementioned interview with Variety.
That family-oriented nature was also highlighted by Ted Danson, a friend and co-star on The Good Place, in a piece he wrote for Time magazine a few months ago about his co-star: “On set, she is a dazzling combination of talent and efficiency. The efficiency comes with the caveat that no one should stop her from getting home in time to have dinner with her kids.”
Since 2013, Bell has been married to fellow actor Dax Shepard, whom she proposed to via Twitter. They didn’t get married until after same-sex marriage was legalized in California, as a form of protest. The couple sparked controversy last November when the actress posted on Instagram (where she has 16 million followers) to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. She did so with a message that many interpreted as a tasteless joke about domestic violence — precisely in November, Gender Violence Awareness Month: “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 incentivized to kill you, I never would,’” she wrote alongside a picture of herself embracing her husband.
This comment, and other seemingly innocent anecdotes the actress has shared lately, have reignited the conversation about her marriage. The Cut published an opinion piece on the matter titled “I Love My Husband (Who Hates Me).” Even Cher publicly declared that Bell (with whom she worked in 2010 on Burlesque) deserves a better husband. Moreover, she said so on Shepard’s own podcast, Armchair Expert, which has featured many celebrities. “You must have something I don’t see,” she quipped after saying that she was “definitely the good half” of the couple. For now, she remains unfazed by the criticism and focused on her busy work schedule.
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