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" Published in the September 2012 issue It&amp;#039;s 8:47 a.m. on a cloudy &amp;quot;June Gloom&amp;quot; Monday morning and I&amp;#039;m standing next to the grizzly bear statue at the entrance to L. A.&amp;#039;s Griffith Park and I&amp;#039;m starting to think that Kristen Bell has stood me up. She&amp;#039;s twenty minutes late, but she hasn&amp;#039;t called, texted, or e-mailed. Maybe I&amp;#039;m in the wrong place. Maybe this is the wrong time. Maybe I was supposed to be looking for Christian Bale, not the blondest blond actress in Hollywood \u2014 the star of Showtime&amp;#039;s half-hour-long comedy House of Lies, the current face of Neutrogena, the Sarah Marshall in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Or maybe she always keeps people waiting like this. Actresses. Hollywood. Of course. A few minutes later, I see a small woman jaywalking across Los Feliz Boulevard. Sunglasses. Black leggings. Nikes. A violet shawl. No way that&amp;#039;s her. Mainly because she&amp;#039;s walking \u2014 walking to a hike is something you stop doing the first time you get top billing. But it&amp;#039;s her. And she&amp;#039;s panting. And she&amp;#039;s apologizing profusely. And she&amp;#039;s smiling.  &amp;quot;Could I be wearing darker sunglasses?&amp;quot; Bell says. She removes her shades to reveal robin&amp;#039;s-egg-blue eyes. &amp;quot;Can you please have your article be about how I&amp;#039;m hiding my shifty eyes? I might as well be wearing a mask.&amp;quot; The location was Bell&amp;#039;s choice. Consensus says the &amp;quot;actor canyon&amp;quot; is Runyon, a mile toward Hollywood and overflowing with stars and paparazzi. But it turns out she and her husband, actor Dax Shepard, live a few blocks east of Griffith, in the wine-bar bohemia of Los Feliz.   &amp;quot;Fuck Runyon,&amp;quot; Bell says when I point out that she&amp;#039;s breaking type. She seems almost offended. But then she seems distracted.  As an old lady wearing a SARS mask strolls past, she pivots to walk backward and asks me, deadpan, &amp;quot;Did you not get the message about the outbreak?&amp;quot; For the next couple hours, nothing gets past the thirty-two-year-old actress. No hiker, no runner, no baby. She comments on everything. No moment that is even remotely interesting is going to waste.  It would appear that Kristen Bell can hang. She says she&amp;#039;s been hyperobservant, self-deprecating, and a little profane since she was a teenager in suburban Detroit going to Catholic school. She&amp;#039;s proud that she was voted &amp;quot;Best Looking&amp;quot; by her senior class. She&amp;#039;s proud that she could rap every word of Too Short&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Blowjob Betty.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s proud that she was one of only two girls playing roller hockey with the guys. &amp;quot;The one time I forgot pads, I broke both wrists and wore a freak cast for two months,&amp;quot; Bell says, raising her arms to mimic her temporary Lurch limbs. &amp;quot;It was that special time when you want to not talk to boys.&amp;quot; What she&amp;#039;d rather talk about, though, as we stretch in the shadow of the Griffith Observatory, is a crew of chubby thugs in sweatpants doing side bends. &amp;quot;Has there ever been a cuter workout class?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They look like Weevil&amp;#039;s motorcycle gang getting in shape to ride again.&amp;quot; This is a Veronica Mars reference, the teen noir for the Internet age that morphed Bell into a Comic-Con crush from 2004 to 2007. After it was canceled, Bell did a season of Heroes and began her work as the omniscient narrator on Gossip Girl. In 2008, she played the Russell Brand \u2014 banging title character in Judd Apatow&amp;#039;s $100-million-grossing Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Around the same time, she met Shepard, a fellow Detroit native, at a Kings \u2014 Red Wings game.   Bell&amp;#039;s new romantic/action comedy, Hit &amp;amp;amp; Run, written and codirected by Shepard, captures the odd-couple dynamic of their early courtship, when Shepard, the once hard-living star of Punk&amp;#039;d, was forced to address his past. &amp;quot;You couldn&amp;#039;t find two more extremes. He used to be a drug addict, and I don&amp;#039;t know if I&amp;#039;ve even seen cocaine at a party, let alone done it. When I found out that my Prince Charming has gone on five-day benders where no one could find him, I was like, &amp;#039;Wait, what?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; And then: &amp;quot;Is this guy taking a piss?&amp;quot; Bell says, pointing out a shirtless guy standing on the side of the trail with his back to us. &amp;quot;Because that would be amazing.&amp;quot; We creep down the dirt slope, careful not to disturb the hiker. From five feet away, it&amp;#039;s obvious he&amp;#039;s just savoring the view. Bell looks disappointed. On the descent from the peak of Mount Hollywood, Bell extols meditation, veganism, and therapy and then mocks herself for being clich\u00E9. She says she wasn&amp;#039;t embarrassed by the recent YouTube video of her thrilled-bordering-on-distraught reaction to Shepard&amp;#039;s presenting her with a live sloth for her birthday. (&amp;quot;Who doesn&amp;#039;t like sloths?&amp;quot;) She says that picking up a friend from surgery is more meaningful to her than acclaim for her acting. And then, apropos of something probably only she sees, she sings a flawless rendition of the stool song from her favorite film, Waiting for Guffman. And now Kristen Bell is late again. It&amp;#039;s 10:30 A.M. and she has a flight to Oregon to catch. So she gives a hug goodbye as though we&amp;#039;ve been friends for years. She starts heading out but then stops and points to a mulleted guy in sagging gray jorts. &amp;quot;Instagram this beautiful dude,&amp;quot; she says. Then she smiles and starts jogging back home.  Incidentally, it&amp;#039;s now sunny as hell. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a15114/kristen-bell-0912/?click=esq_latest>