Kristen Bell is opening up about a frightening scene in Nobody Wants This season 3.
“I had a near-death experience with 10 members of the crew on the season … in the waves,” Bell, 46, said during the Monday, October 26, episode of husband Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.
The Veronica Mars alum added, “We were on the beach … I had to get in the water … and I had to pretend to be nude, so I’m wearing a scuba suit from here down. So I had to go out to at least where my sternum was, and I went out with, I think, nine or 10 crew members, and we had one-for-one stunts with us, which means every person has a stunt person bracing them.”
Bell recalled that one of the cameras captured “eight-foot waves” crashing behind her.
“I’m trying to speak my Hebrew, and then dunk myself until the wave eventually crashes,” she recalled. “Just before it’s about to crash, all the stunt people start screaming. I get hoisted out of the air by two stunt women who are helping me. Every crew member has a stunt person, like, pushing them into the sand. Poor Aaron, our A camera operator, was getting pummeled by the waves. Both cameras were underwater.”
Bell described the incident as “mayhem,” adding that the water was “so cold.”
“We finally come in, and the director says, ‘OK, we didn’t get it.’ And we were all like, ‘You think?’” she recalled. “And he was like, ‘We’re going to need to go out again.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know that we can. We’re not going to get anything better. Somebody’s going to be washed away.’”
Despite the setback, Bell and the crew managed to get the scene done.
“I watched the takes really quickly, and I saw what Hebrew phrases we did not get, and so I just did those ones. I said, ‘I’m going to chop all this up in editing in my head right now. I’m going to go out for the least amount of time possible,’” she explained. “When you watch the show, you’ll notice the only angle they use is the side angle because the front-on angle, it was horrific to watch.”
Bell shared that the team was initially against doing the scene in the ocean and suggested filming in a water tank, but her costar Adam Brody insisted that a tank would not be realistic enough.
“I know you were very against the tank because you didn’t think … you said it wouldn’t have the feel of the ocean,” Bell told Brody, 46. The O.C. alum said he also suggested finding a natural body of water that would not have large waves, such as Paradise Cove in Malibu.
Though the experience was harrowing, Bell, Brody, and their costars Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons all agreed that it was worth it in the end because the final version looked “amazing.”
Fans can check out the scene for themselves in Nobody Wants This season 3, which is now streaming on Netflix.
