NEWSKristen Bell Talks Swine Flu, Charity Work & Christina Aguilera
Oct. 23 2009, Published 8:02 a.m. ET
With the holiday season coming on faster than we all realize, Kristen Bell talked to OK! about what she is thankful for in life — Her health, career, and a cause worth fighting for.
The Astro Boy actress chatted with OK! at Guess and Vanity Fair's party in support of Invisible Children in Beverly Hills, where she admitted she has a lot to be happy about and the first that came to mind was her health.
"At the top of the list is definitely not getting H1N1," she told OK!. "Other than everything, I feel like it's a difficult decision because I feel thankful for almost everything in my life."
Kristen's career has been on fire with her recent starring roles in Couples Retreat and the upcoming When in Rome — which features real-life boyfriend Dax Shepard.
Next on the list is her role as Christina Aguilera's rival in Burlesque.
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"I'm excited. I'm really excited. It's a different role for me," she explained. "It's kind of a departure, which is exciting. I don't want to be pigeonholed as the bubblegum girl next door and this is getting back to my snarkier roots. There is a lot of dancing in the movie, which is intimidating, but I think Christina is unreasonably talented in pretty much every facet of her life. She has written music for the movie, which is crazy good. I'm excited to start."
The former Veronica Mars star was also excited to finally have found a charity in Invisible Children — an organization that films the stories about the unseen war and displaced refugees in Northern Uganda — that she could really pour her heart and soul into.
"I hadn't found a cause yet and I knew that if I ever had a platform and people cared about what I was saying, that I would speak about causes that were important to me," she explained to OK!.
Kristen's involvement with Invisible Children goes back to her TV days. "I met the documentarians in San Diego when I was working on Veronica Mars and was so paralyzed by what they presented in this documentary and furious that no one else knew about it," she recalled. "The numbers of children that are taken weekly, how long this has been going on and the lack of involvement of anyone else in the world to stand up for these people's humanities... it infuriated me."
She used her frustration as a platform to encourage others to help.
"It is frustrating because there is nothing these people can offer us but it has to be people standing up for other people because it's the right thing to do," Kristen explained. "I also love the way they presented the documentary; it's not sad music and children that are crying and begging for five dollars."
She added, "A lot of it is the kids laughing and the story telling about what they live through every day. It's very powerful because it's inspiring at the end of the documentary."
Reporting by Jaime Rabb
