While Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are one of Hollywood’s made-for-each-other couples now, their chemistry was far from immediate. In fact, it took a bold gesture from Shepard for Bell to even notice he was interested.
Remembering the first few times they met during an episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson & Woody Harrelson (Sometimes), Bell talked about meeting Shepard for the first time at a mutual friend’s dinner party before running into him again at a hockey game soon after.
As they chatted during the game, Shepard made quite an unexpected move. “I was chewing gum and he said, ‘Do you have any more gum?’ and I said, ‘No, just this,’ and I kind of coyly took it out of my mouth like this,” The Good Place star remembered, per Entertainment Tonight. “And he grabbed it from me, and he goes, ‘I’ll take it,’ and then he put it in his mouth, and I was like, ‘This guy wants to f— me.'”
Harrelson then chimed in, agreeing that it was quite a move. “Yeah. It’s on,” he said.
Prior to that moment, Bell admitted she wasn’t flirting with Shepard, and had her eyes on their mutual friend Michael Rosenbaum instead.
“I knew Michael and I was like, ‘All right, we’re, we’re back on the [market], we’re single. We haven’t been single in years. This is gonna be great. I’m gonna go over and flirt with Michael,'” she revealed on the podcast.
Despite her mission, however, Rosenbaum was preoccupied. “Thank god, Michael, because it, you know, made the rest of my life,” she said. “Michael had something else to do and was talking to someone else and Dax came up to me and I was like, ‘Oh, you were at Shauna’s dinner,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right. I remember you vaguely.'”
At said dinner, Bell’s first impression of Shepard wasn’t the best. “All I remember from that night was that guy from Jackass talks so much,” Bell remembered. “He didn’t know who I was either and obviously he was not on Jackass, he was on Punk’d, but I didn’t know that at the time, and then we had no chemistry that night.”
But, despite having no chemistry, Bell remembered feeling some sort of way about him. “He has a presence,” she said. “A protectiveness and he has very broad shoulders. He’s like an upside-down triangle, but my main takeaway was that he was chatty.”
So while their first impressions might not have been the best, it didn’t take long for them to turn it around. Since then, Bell and Shepard, who got married in 2013, also welcomed daughters Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9. And the rest is history!
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