Name: Kristen Bell Breaks Down Her Career, from 'Gossip Girl' to 'Frozen' | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T10:10:16.000Z
Duration: 17 min 18 s
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I would get feedback from an audition like, Well, you're not pretty enough to play like the pretty girl.

To-infinitive

But you're not, like, quirky enough for weird enough to play the weird girl.

Past simple

And I was like, Okay, so does that just mean, like, I can't be an actor?

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

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

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.

I think we were like smoking and drinking on a street corner, and that was my first film experience.

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.

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.

The only reason I was allowed past the velvet ropes was Duncan Kane.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

I did not actually read the script before I auditioned for Sarah.

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.

Because seemingly the only actresses that actually can survive are the ones that show their cooter.

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.