In early January, Kristen Bell and Cher joined Dax Shepard to record an episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert. It soon devolved into an awkward, if painfully relatable, situation: a confrontation between your husband and your friend who has never liked him. After Cher said Bell was Shepard’s “better half,” he asked who her “dream partner” for Bell would be, “because I know you think she could do better, and I don’t disagree.” Neither did viewers. “Cher is right,” they wrote under the now-viral clips of the interaction. “He hates and resents his wife.”
Bell laughed it off and told Cher that Shepard was “almost too good” for her. It wasn’t the first time she found herself defending their relationship. In 2020, Bell joked about the time she left Shepard a note asking him to do laundry, leading to a fight so intense they didn’t speak for three days; to mark their 12th wedding anniversary this past October, Bell wrote a post on Instagram dedicated to “the man who once said to me: I would never kill you … Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.”
The strange joke (or was it a confession?) sparked so much backlash that Bell limited her Instagram comments. A few weeks later, writer and YouTuber Melanie Hamlett posted a song she wrote skewering the couple’s dynamic, and Bell popped up in her notifications. “You don’t know me, my husband, or my marriage, which is filled with love and laughter btw,” she wrote in a series of comments under the post.
