One of Dax Shepard’s most beloved roles was Crosby Braverman on Parenthood, but he almost passed on the opportunity to be with his now-wife, Kristen Bell.
“I chose her, which blew my mind,” the actor, 44, said on his podcast “Armchair Expert” on Monday, March 25, while chatting with guest Chris D’Elia. “I got offered Parenthood — I hadn’t acted in a long time, no one was offering me anything — and they said, ‘This show shoots in Philadelphia,’ and I said, ‘There’s no way I can be in this relationship and move to Philadelphia.’”
Shepard explained that he initially “turned that show down — which, by the way, was certainly the first time in my life that I had ever done that.”
“I couldn’t believe I was doing that,” he continued, noting that he “very much wanted to be on that show” and found the prospect of living in Philadelphia “very appealing.”
Luckily for the Employee of the Month star, NBC ended up moving the filming location to Los Angeles, so he reversed course and accepted the role of Crosby. The drama aired for six seasons from 2010 to 2015.
“What’s so ironic is you make a decision like that and then, weirdly, you’re rewarded,” he said.
Shepard and Bell, 38, started dating in 2007 after meeting at their mutual friend Michael Rosenbaum’s party. They quickly fell in love and got engaged in 2010, though they waited until 2013 to tie the knot after same-sex marriage was legalized in California. The couple share daughters Lincoln, 5, and Delta, 4.
“Our marriage took a lot of work, takes a lot of work. I don’t think people realize,” the Frozen star told Us Weekly in 2017. “It is not easy to work around another human being, but if you commit to it, you can pretty much permanently respect that person, but then it doesn’t really matter if you disagree because you still respect that person. But on a daily basis, he just makes me laugh all the time. He’s obsessed with attention, so he’s constantly making jokes to try to get me to give him more attention or to get me to giggle. And you know, he was a stand-up comedian, so I’m living with a comedian.”
