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In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed, the actor and new mother talks about learning to love herself, Veronica Mars movie fears, and her fierce war against the pedorazzi.
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"They're fucking crazy people," said a clearly heated Kristen Bell about the paparazzi and their competitive desire to capture first photographs of celebrities. "I mean, this is what killed Princess Diana." The swarming paps have become such a pervasive problem for Bell and husband Dax Shepard, who welcomed daughter Lincoln last March, that they've joined up with Jennifer Garner and Halle Berry, who recently helped pass an anti-paparazzi bill in the state of California.
"I have confidence that the American public wants to be well-informed consumers," Bell told BuzzFeed. "I think if they knew that in order for them to get a picture of a kid at the park, it means that kid was followed by nine strange men, who are yelling and calling him names, for 16 blocks, I think people would choose not to look at the pictures if they knew the psychological impact that has on the kid."
While Garner and Berry's efforts have attacked the issue from a supply level, Bell and Shepard hope to address the demand side of the equation with their #Pedorazzi initiative. To that end, they've urged their Twitter followers to stop buying magazines that use photos of non-consenting minors and written op-eds, appeared on the Today show, and tweeted at dozens of outlets to stop running these images.
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Bell knows these pleas will fall on deaf ears in many instances. "I am targeting the [media outlets] I think have the integrity to change. I'm not targeting InTouch or Life & Style or Star, because they're as bad as The National Enquirer. If you put the face of a 6-year-old on the cover of your magazine, and print 'Suri's Hidden Drama,' you're an asshole. That's a 6-year-old! Are you fucking kidding me? What's wrong with you?"
Thus far, Bell and Shepard's endeavors have been met with nearly universal praise, according to Bell, who estimates that roughly 5% of the responses are negative and mostly comprise people saying she should have known that this is the price of fame.
"Look, I'm sorry I didn't know that my profession would eventually make my child miserable, because if I had, I never would have chosen this career," she said of the criticism. "I would be in [my hometown in] Michigan, trying to be as happy as possible, and feeling good about who I was."
Bell is also aware that this problem affects "like, 50 people," but feels her history of global advocacy more than entitles her to tackle an issue that hits so close to home. "There are absolutely bigger issues in the world, and I stand up for a lot of them on a pretty regular basis," she said of her work with the ASPCA, Do Something, and Invisible Children, among other causes.
"The reason I can stand for this confidently is because I do my shit elsewhere. I've been to Africa and seen the projects I've raised money for. My side of the street is clean. I'm not sleeping on the job here. I just think it's really important to acknowledge where we're heading as a culture if we choose to ignore these kinds of issues."
Refusing to accept that our society is, by and large, willfully ignorant is exactly why she's now drumming up support for I Am That Girl, a new motivational book written by Alexis Jones, whom Bell first met in 2008 at an Invisible Children lobbying event in Washington, D.C. The book is an extension of the website that Jones owns and operates, which is designed to empower — and re-empower — women of all ages.
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