Lake Bell for The Fall
I’m wandering through a labyrinthine studio in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood looking for air conditioning.
It’s an unusually hot day and Lake Bell is just ahead of me, dressed in the Southern Californian new mother uniform of a swimsuit, cover up, and Birkenstocks. Bell, the actress/writer/director of films In a World, and the upcoming I Do… Until I Don’t just had her second child with husband Scott Campbell and while that might be an innocuous statement to make about any other 38-year-old woman, it’s something Bell never thought would happen to her.
In an interview in 2013, right after she finished In a World—her highly lauded film about sexism in the voice-over industry—Bell described her next project as something she was doing to massage out some theories that she had on marriage. Did she come to any conclusions I wonder as she settles into a folding chair in a tiny upstairs recording studio that is thankfully well-chilled. “I think where I started—when I first started writing I Do… Until I Don’t I had a fairly cynical view of marriage and unionship,” she says. “I was an unromantic in many ways, but it was also because of the examples around me: my family and my friends. It seemed a bit doomed: the concept that we should convict ourselves of this ceremony, this thing called marriage that seems somewhat archaic in this day and age considering that we just live longer." That was around the time that she married her now-husband, a tattoo artist who she met on the set of TV show How To Make It In America in 2011. What changed? “Every unromantic desperately hopes to be proven wrong,” she says with a knowing sigh. “And so it happened for me. All of my research and all of my therapeutic investigation of this concept and conversation has really led me to figure out that the real privilege and benefit of marriage and vowed unionship is evolution." She bobs her foot, looking out the windows into the space below. “You have to commit to someone and look them in the eye and have them call you on your bullshit and then also call them out on their bullshit in order to evolve, I think."
I Do... centers around several couples in Vero Beach, a sleepy barrier island on the coast of Florida. When a documentary filmmaker Vivian (played with just enough vinegar by the wonderful Dolly Wells) arrives to focus her attention on the failing pursuit of marriage she brings three couples together both within their own relationships and to each other. ‘Ensemble comedy’ is a term that gets trotted out a lot these days, but both In a World and I Do… rally around central themes of exploring a variety of characters and the interconnectedness of our lives. I ask Bell whether she initially set out to be an ensemble director. “I make movies that are largely character-driven,” she says cautiously, “not like ‘the world blows up and then what?’ I love people. I’m interested in stories about characters that I have grown up with or that I have seen in my travels that I need to express. I think ensemble definitely satiates my want and need to find comedy in human interaction. The more robust characters you have to play with the more fodder for comedy, you know?” Her films are so unrelentingly individual that I wonder what some of her inspirations are. “The movies that I always think about are Paul Mazursky movies or Woody Allen, obviously,” she tells me. “In a more contemporary fashion, I love David O. Russell, but in general, I do enjoy ensemble.” She pauses thoughtfully before offering an addendum: “I wouldn’t consider myself only limited to that though.”
Past interviews with Bell have pinned her a as bit of a wild card, but she is very considerate and deliberate in her language. Her sentences often start off in one direction and then change course as she gets going, becoming more precise and tending towards the personal and the specific rather than the general. When I comment that the Amber Heard-played character Fanny, from I Do… is remarkably nuanced despite the many easy pitfalls of writing a bohemian free love-type, Bell reveals that the character is actually a tamed down version of her own sister Josie, who she calls “a force to be reckoned with” before launching into an exploration of jealousy (which she says is “so embarrassing and humiliating and messy”). Using an example from her own life—her two and a half year old daughter who is currently dealing with her feelings towards her new brother—Bell says, “Seeing her wrestle with that monster of a feeling is really honest and heartbreaking and it’s something that I’m really interested in.”
It’s long been a cliche to “write what you know” and a dirty truth that a comedian’s best material usually comes from their family, but Bell’s use of her personal life in her work feels—from an outside perspective—more like honest and loving exploration of the personalities that shaped her than cheap caricature for laughs. “Unfortunately for my family,” she tells me, “I always use them in my characters, and none of them are exactly carbon copies of what my mom and dad, and brothers and sisters are like, but you know, my dad has a great sense of humor so I guess that aspect of it is there.”
Beginning with Sally Heep on The Practice and Boston Legal, to Cameron Diaz’ best friend Tipper in What Happens in Vegas, to Carol Solomon in In a World..., Bell has repeatedly played characters that are not too far a stretch from what one imagines her personality to be: whip smart and always able to get what she wants. It comes as a shock then to see her play Alice in I Do… a character whose appearance and personality are so effacing that she practically melts into the sets. I ask if she wrote the character for herself or if she stepped in when she couldn’t find anyone better. “Yeah, I did literally write it for myself to play,” she tells me. “There’s a lot of my mother in that character but my mom’s not deeply uncertain about things, it’s just—that’s her countenance. I sort of took on a character that I’d always wanted to play, but that nobody would ever cast me in, and the character Alice is very low-status, insecure, somewhat soft-spoken, and struggling to find her voice. I just feel that that’s the type of character that I would never get an opportunity to play."
It comes up so often in our conversation that as an actor and as a person, Bell’s primarily interest is growth. Speaking about her role in the upcoming Ric Roman Waugh-directed Shot Caller—a scathing indictment of the US prison system—Bell tells me, “What I love about being an actor is that I get to step into a world that I might not know anything about. It is a constant education, from accents and dialects to different countries to different political views or world views. With Shot Caller, it was a really intense, eye-opening experience about the prison system. It’s the kind of story and the tone of story that I’ve never been a part of." Starring Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Shot Caller follows the story of a successful Los Angeles financier who inadvertently kills his friend while driving drunk. He is sentenced to maximum security prison where he is thrust into an ecosystem of violent prison gang warfare and forced to choose a side. Bell plays his wife Kate, from whom we see him slip away the deeper he goes into the gang. Regarding that role, she says, “I try to look for projects and work with directors that I might learn something from. And certainly with No Escape [a 2015 film about an American family struggling to get out of a South-East Asian country during a violent uprising] and now with Shot Caller, it’s all part of my film school—getting to be part of a production with different energy and tone."
Her other upcoming feature would seem to be diametrically opposed. Home Again is a romantic comedy about a middle aged divorceé (Reese Witherspoon) finding lust with a younger man. The film—directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (Nancy Meyers’ daughter)—doesn’t do the same heavy lifting as I Do… or Shot Caller, but Bell’s involvement in it can be traced similarly to her interest in new experiences. Asking about that role, she replies: “Nancy and Hallie called me to say, ‘Could you come and be a colossal bitch?’ and I was like, ‘When do we start?’” She laughs. “Again, that’s the kind of character that I have never played—where I get to be a real jerk."
Bell’s penchant for defying expectations can be found throughout her life as well as her career. Take the automotive column she wrote for The Hollywood Reporter. In one of the earliest pieces, she writes: “When I was a little girl, my dad always told me I should never settle. But he was referring specifically to high-performance luxury vehicles and not the more sentimental topics that another might address.” Her father, Harvey Siegel, owns race car tracks Virginia International Raceway and New Jersey Motorsports Park and is is an ameture racer and avid collector of vintage cars. Bell grew up in the world of competitive motorsports, but when she started writing the THR column she says that her dad was taken by surprise. “He hadn’t noticed that I had taken on any point of view when it comes to the automotive world,” she says, adding with a big smile, “But I think he was pretty jazzed when I told him.”
A publicist pops her head in to tell us that we’re running up against the clock. The photo shoot is scheduled to begin and Bell has to get into hair and makeup. With time for one last question I ask her, in light of the overwhelming success of Wonder Woman achieved this year—in many ways the same film that her character in In a World wins the voice-over job for—whether she feels that the success of that film has been a game-changer for female-helmed productions? “I mean, yes.” She says empathetically. “It just is, it’s just the reality of the situation. It’s a huge coup, and I’m elated about it. In a world where—she laughs—in a world where the news is very dark and the climate of our politics and where we stand as a nation is so challenged, it’s a beautiful thing that in our industry at least we are making a lot of progress. It’s a beautiful thing that this force of a female story can do so well, helmed by a female director. It’s just very exciting.”
Driving back in the baking heat, it strikes me that Bell—a British drama school alum who has been repeatedly ranked one of the sexiest women in the world—could easily be taking high-profile roles with the high-profile paychecks to match, but here she is, slugging it out in the independent film world. A cynic would say that she is simply playing the long game—she’s all too aware of the diminishing returns to be found in banking on her looks—but something she said in regards to marriage may hold the clue to understanding her unconventional career path: “Evolution is our privilege as human beings.” Be that as it may, what I do know is that if Bell doesn’t find the roles that she requires, she’ll just make them herself.