A YouTube-famous doctor is dishing on the time that Kristen Bell asked him if it was OK for her to drink her own urine.
In a clip from “The Basement Yard” podcast that recently went viral, Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, a.k.a. Dr. Mike, told hosts Joe Santagato and Frank Alvarez about “a famous celebrity” who asked him “if she should drink her own urine because her friend was doing it.”
Dr. Mike, 36, then decided to share the person’s name, arguing that it wasn’t a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) because she is not his patient.
“Kristen Bell, I can’t believe you really considered drinking urine!” he said to the camera.
Dr. Mike said he “respectfully” told Bell, 45, that she should not drink urine.
In Bell’s defense, she asked Dr. Mike the unusual health question because her Nobody Wants This costar Justine Lupe had convinced the Veronica Mars star that she was drinking her own urine as part of an elaborate prank.
Bell and Lupe, 36, discussed the April Fool’s joke at length during their joint appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast last year. The prank took “four or five weeks” to execute while they were filming Nobody Wants This season 2.
“She goes, ‘Well, I mean, I just started it, but I think that it’s really been helping me,’” Bell recalled Lupe saying.
“The next installment was that I brought pee to work,” Lupe added. “I put it in a mason jar, and then I moved it into a canteen because we thought, ‘Too obvious.’ We can’t have it in a canteen. We have to put it into a mason jar.”
Lupe even concocted a fake article about the benefits of drinking your own pee.
“I said, ‘Justine, where are you getting this info?’ Like, if you visited some witch and she said, ‘Do this,’ we need to discuss it,” Bell recalled telling her costar. “But like, if you research this, I feel like we should look into this before you actually do it. Could be bacteria in there. It’s waste, honey.”
Bell said she then called Dr. Mike for advice.
“I said, I have a friend who is drinking her own urine. What are the risks-slash-benefits of this? Have you heard anything about it? And he was like, ‘Well, honestly, I think it sounds insane, but I don’t think it would hurt her,’” Dr. Mike told Bell.
The prank eventually ended when Lupe brought Bell a cooler of her “urine” — which was really a tea concoction. Bell recalled telling Lupe, “I don’t want this.”
“And then she said, ‘April Fool’s.’ And it was April 1,” Bell continued. “I have never felt more loved in my entire life than when it occurred to me how long she had been working on this and how many props and how much performance and how many people had been wrangled into this. And I just felt very loved.”
