Kristen Bell got candid on Justin Long’s “Life Is Short” podcast about her and Dax Shepard’s marriage, warts and all.
In the Tuesday, January 28, episode of the podcast, the Good Place actress, 39, revealed that she and Shepard, 45, realized early on that their relationship would always be in the spotlight. “So if we were going to talk about it, let’s make sure we show the good, the bad and the ugly, and how we handle it,” she said. “Let’s not make it saccharine. And we really try hard to not make it saccharine, and we talk about the fact that we do fight, we do go to therapy, we dislike each other a lot sometimes.”
She went on: “In fact, we had this pretty incredible fight recently. Incredible. I mean, like, top of the lungs screaming,” she shared. “It was about things around the house that I felt I needed help with, and we have a relationship where you are supposed to be able to say, ‘I need your help with this.’ … I left a note and I was like, ‘Hey, Dad! Would you mind taking the two towels in the dryer and folding them,’ and then, like, one other thing.”
Acknowledging on the podcast that she was only presenting her side of the story, Bell contended that she thought it would only be 10 minutes of work for the Bless This Mess actor. But he didn’t appreciate the instructions. “He goes, ‘When you leave me notes, yeah, I feel really controlled.’ And he launched into how he felt about it.”
That’s when their argument erupted. “We both blacked out and got into a fight, and I don’t actually remember what happened, but what transpired was a lot of volume, a lot of harsh words being thrown around, and it was an angry, angry fight about how nobody does anything for anybody else,” Bell recalled. “I grabbed my pillow and I stomped down the hall and I sleep in the front room and I’m crying, right? And we don’t talk for three days.”
At the end of those three days, the couple broke their stalemate when they found a rescue dog they couldn’t resist. “I didn’t get an apology, but I got a dog!” the Veronica Mars star said. “We never talked about that fight ever, but I will say this: Every single thing that I have needed done or thought, ‘I’d want help with this,’ since that fight, he has been ahead of. I couldn’t complain about him if I tried right now.”
Bell and Shepard have been married since 2013 and have two daughters, Lincoln, 6, and Delta, 5.
