“Do you wanna do the full hike?” Kristen Bell asks, her blue eyes glinting in the last drops of late-afternoon sun.

Why not? Clearly, she’s up for it. The actress has arrived at L.A.’s Griffith Park, prepared for a rigorous trek, her petite frame clad in a workout top and a pair of seriously short shorts that show off her toned legs. She starts up the dirt path, two of her dogs in tow.

But while Kristen is interested in a workout, the dogs have other ideas. Minutes into the hike, Lola, a 5-year-old chow chow-corgi mix, stops in her tracks. “Already?” Kristen says with good-natured exasperation. “Now that’s embarrassing.” Not to be outdone, Mr. Shakes, a 41/2-year-old mutt, decides to do his business smack in the middle of the high-traffic trail. “I didn’t bring any bags with me!” Would notebook paper do? “I’ll take it,” Kristen says, crouching down to clean up the mess. Then, without missing a beat: “Now, where was I?”

Cranking Up Her Career
That ability to deftly deal with anything life throws in her path has pretty much characterized Kristen’s career. The 29-year-old actress first appeared on everyone’s radar as TV’s wisecracking high school sleuth Veronica Mars, then burnished her fanboy cred with an electrifying turn on Heroes. Her current small-screen gig, providing the voice of the unseen title character on Gossip Girl, surely ranks as her easiest. She logs about an hour in the voice-over booth every two weeks, though she says she’d welcome a more time-consuming on-screen role if it included bedding down with Chuck Bass, the show’s resident bad boy, played to slick perfection by Ed Westwick.

But Chuck will have to wait. Right now, Kristen’s busy shooting a movie—You Again, in which she plays a publicist who discovers that her big brother is about to marry her high school nemesis—as well as promoting two new flicks. In Couples Retreat, she mines comedic gold from marriage counseling alongside her on-screen husband Jason Bateman, and she adds a dash of her patented sass to the animated Astro Boy.

But it’s her upcoming January release, When in Rome, that’s closest to her heart. In the movie, she fishes five coins from an Italian fountain and finds herself with more amore than she can handle. Dax Shepard, Kristen’s real-life boyfriend of two years, costars as one of her five suitors. “We were trying to one-up each other,” she says of their scenes together, as she plops down on a huge boulder in the park. “That’s what we do at home, too. It’s like, ‘Wait—watch me do this funny bit.’ ‘No, watch me do this funny bit!’ There’s a lot of friendly competition. It’s wonderful.”

Romantic Revelations
Kristen lights up noticeably when she talks about Dax. “I’ve learned the necessity for healthy communication,” she explains. “How important it is to talk about your deepest, darkest fears and feelings. Your partner should hear your most embarrassing insecurities, because once you say them out loud, you’ve created a safe zone.” She’s discovered something else: “A snuggle party can fix anything—it’s true.”

A confidant is especially welcome now since, thanks to her big-screen 1-2-3 punch, Kristen has reached a pivotal and pressure-filled point in her career. If the movies are megahits, she’s bound to be labeled an It Girl—a term that makes her shudder. “It sounds so disposable!” she says.

When sizing up her It Girl competition, Kristen is refreshingly honest—and sweet. “I want to hate Megan Fox more than anything,” she confesses, with a smile. “We all do. But I read a bunch of her [interview] quotes, and she’s witty and smart and carefree. I thought, ‘This is the kind of girl I’d love to be friends with.’”
It seems that if ever there was an actress less like the insecure, self-involved starlet at the center of last year’s big-screen comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it’s the woman who played her. Here is someone who commiserates with a fellow hiker about the challenges of clipping coarse dog hair, who blows a kiss to a homeless guy who asks her to marry him (he catches it), and who, after standing to show off some recently learned dance moves, tugs at the back of her shorts and says, “Forgive me. I have a wedgie in my bum.”

Credit the grounded Midwestern background. Growing up Catholic in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Detroit with a TV-news director dad and a nurse mom, she honed her performance skills early (“I ripped up the dance floor at many bar and bat mitzvahs my 13th year”) and learned that getting what you want—in her case, acceptance into the musical theater program at New York University—meant working two jobs to help with the bills. The summer before moving East, “I worked at a coffeehouse from 5:30 a.m. till 1:30 p.m., then worked the second shift at Outback Steakhouse— ironic because I’m a vegetarian. I always smelled like a Bloomin’ Onion.” Not that that’s a bad thing. The deep-fried appetizer is “so good!” Kristen gushes. “Like drinking a delicious, crunchy cup of oil.”

What Does a Body Good
While the girl still adores her junk food—she was delighted when, for her July birthday, two best friends from home sent her a butter cream and chocolate cake from a Michigan bakery— Kristen takes care of her body. Besides hiking (when her pups cooperate), she tries to squeeze in some sort of physical activity every day, whether it’s lifting weights with a trainer (“I’ll get through a much longer workout if I’m not by myself”) or just choosing to take the stairs or a 20-minute walk during lunch: “I’ll snack on my lunch the rest of the day: eat a handful, do some work, then eat another gigantic handful. It spaces the meal out to a place that my body can handle.”

For Kristen, food often provides both a creative outlet and a communal experience. She loves browsing online for recipes, then whipping up one of her discoveries, whether it’s for her boyfriend (“I cooked a chicken pot pie from scratch. Dax said it was the best thing he’d ever eaten”) or for the rotating group of guests who regularly attend dinner parties at her Spanish-style home, nicknamed Hotel Bell.

“Cooking makes me feel like a provider, like I’m needed,” explains Kristen, who, instead of putting on the usual background music during her homey get-togethers, injects a little offbeat humor with an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos on TiVo. (Another TV favorite, by the way, is Bret Michaels’ Rock of Love, which Kristen calls “a hot mess of embarrassment that you want to lie in forever.”)

The self-professed homebody even concocts her own body scrubs out of honey, fine brown sugar, and baby oil, and swears she enjoys doing her own household chores. “I always feel empowered when I’m domestic,” she says. “There’s something about doing your own laundry and dishes that means you deserve to sit on the couch at night.”

Make no mistake: Kristen may spend her days scaling the summit called Hollywood, but her nights are hers. “There is almost nothing, barring a natural disaster, that I would let eat into my time at home, playing Scrabble with Dax or talking to my girlfriends,” she says. “There’s packing your day and then there’s jam-packing your day, and I won’t do it anymore. I need to decompress. I need to feel like I’m a person—a human being—first.”

Source: Women’s Health

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