Pop culture wouldn’t sound the same without Kristen Bell. From Gossip Girl’s teasing voice-overs to the earnest serenades of Frozen’s Anna, Bell has spent much of her career bringing iconic characters to life using her voice alone. A more difficult task? Showing up to the recording booth as herself.
On the new podcast Shattered Glass, Bell finds herself in the host’s seat for the first time. “This is me having to bring a little bit more to the table intellectually, because everything I had done in the booth prior to this was scripted,” said Bell of the 10-episode series, which premiered on June 23. Inspired by the pivotal roles that women like Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris played in the outcome of the 2020 election, Bell and cohost Monica Padman created Shattered Glass out of a desire to talk to other female trailblazers and share the highs and lows of their personal narratives.
But in order to feel comfortable sitting down with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, and Nobel Memorial Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo, Bell turned to Padman—cocreator and cohost of the wildly popular Armchair Expert podcast, alongside Bell’s husband, Dax Shepard—to help her shore up her interviewing skills and tap into the “magic” of conversation. “I was looking to Monica for guidance about what roads to go down and when to follow a train of thought and how to make the guest feel really comfortable,” Bell told Vanity Fair. “And she was the perfect mentor to have, because she’s done 300 episodes of Armchair Expert, and the perfect person to sort of have sitting right next to me.”
Padman demurred at Bell’s characterization of her as a “mentor,” saying that all Bell needed to tap into her inner Barbara Walters was a healthy dose of self-confidence. “Extemporaneously speaking or writing—she’s incredibly capable of both of those things, but she sometimes doesn’t have confidence in those areas,” said Padman. “So really, it was just me saying, like, hey, you’re good at this. You know how to do it. And suck it up.”
While Padman may be an icon to legions of “Chairies,” others might not be as familiar with her rise to the top of the podcast charts: After acting alongside Bell on the TV show House of Lies, she became Bell and Shepard’s full-time nanny and personal assistant. Eventually, she and Shepard cocreated and launched Armchair Expert, which over the past three years has grown into a multimillion-dollar podcast enterprise and has featured a staggeringly comprehensive guest list of actors, politicians, musicians, and public figures, including Prince Harry, Jane Goodall, Seth Rogen, and Isabel Wilkerson (Shattered Glass is being released under Shephard’s podcast network, Armchair Umbrella, which just signed a first-look deal with Spotify).
As a result, Bell and Padman possess an almost preternatural bond, the type that can only be forged when two lives are so deeply personally and professionally intertwined. “We share the same brain but have different strengths,” said Bell. “So it’s just really good teamwork. And that’s why we keep choosing each other to work with, because it always goes pretty smooth.” Indeed, in the show’s first episode—an interview with Gloria Steinem—the cohosts almost seem to merge into a single unit, seamlessly passing the verbal baton as they interrogate the feminist icon on a spectrum of political and personal topics. This sense of oneness is further underscored by the fact that their voices sound, well, nearly identical, to the point where it’s difficult for listeners to know who’s speaking at a given moment (“The worst part about our podcast is that our voices sound very similar,” said Bell). But while Shattered Glass capitalizes on the strength of Bell and Padman’s connection, it doesn’t coast on it. The focus remains on the guest and her perspective, and Steinem’s even-keeled responses are a grounding force in that initial conversation.
Another highlight from the first season? An interview with Oprah, in which the deity of daytime TV offered Bell some tough love: “One kind of quick spoiler is Oprah told me I had some work to do,” she said. But the openness to that kind of feedback—however unexpected or difficult to hear—speaks to Bell and Padman’s dedication to facilitating real and honest conversations. “I think that’s the sort of magic behind really good podcasts—that they let themselves flow,” said Bell. “It has to be prepared, but it can’t be too scripted. And then you really just have to let a fun conversation consume both of you, or all three of you.”
Bell had a little bit of podcast experience before this; she previously lent her voice to the murder-mystery podcast Deadly Manners, costarring LeVar Burton, Denis O’Hare, and RuPaul, as well as the nonfiction series No One Is Coming to Save Us, an investigation of America’s childcare crisis hosted by ABC News correspondent Gloria Riviera. When asked what she herself listens to, the Good Place star quickly rattled off a list ranging from cerebral to creepy: Radiolab, Invisibilia, More Perfect, Wind of Change, and Root of Evil, which she called “probably the darkest thing I’ve ever exposed myself to.” As for Padman? She’s generally too busy editing tape for her shows to put any more audio into her ears.
While their show was created to tell the stories of successful women, Bell and Padman hope that listeners of all ages, genders, and political affiliations will be able to glean inspiration from the stories of individuals who overcame obstacles and broke new ground. And with a winning mix of down-to-earth banter and top-tier guests, it’s hard to imagine anyone resisting: Listening to Bell and Padman essentially feels like hanging out with the coolest girls in school for an hour, the ones with perfect hair who also aced their APs and were somehow also genuinely nice. On Shattered Glass, women’s narratives may be centered, but everyone’s invited to the table.
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