Few actors have gotten the kind of front-row seat to Hollywood’s inclusivity shift like Lake Bell. The funny woman who earned her IMDb credits by playing the brash best friend in romcoms like What Happens In Vegas and No Strings Attached has been, in her own way, slowly nudging the gates open for the female storytellers that follow. In the last decade, she’s penned award-winning shorts, directed festival darlings, and made the leap to TV, helming two episodes of Hulu’s wild Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson biopic.
We’ll get to that last entry in her filmography in a bit, but to truly understand the many trails Bell has blazed in her journey to cement herself as a creator in the industry we must do what every good storyteller does: start at the beginning. For Bell, that was acting – first at a drama school in England, later as a supporting character on procedural TV shows like The Practice, E.R., and Boston Legal.
“I had a pretty fierce North Star to become an actor,” Bell tells UPROXX. “I knew that was the language that I needed to speak coming out of the gate as a creative.”
She’d go on to experiment with nearly every genre – comedy, drama, horror, thriller, and an irreverent Adult Swim show about a quirky group of doctors with charged libidos that parodies the more serious medical drama fare that is Greys Anatomy. Those gigs helped Bell hone her own voice, one she’d been quietly nurturing while sponging up every lesson each film set had to offer.
“I’d always been a sort of closeted writer,” she explains. “I think as I started to be in the trenches of actually being a working actor and reaping the rewards of that education, I realized it was always written in my heart to tell stories from that point of view: as a writer, as a director, as a producer, and as someone who could creatively erect these stories from nothing. That’s satisfying and scratches a lot of different creative itches.”
As Bell describes it, the cyclic nature of storytelling started to interest her as much, if not more than, the opportunity to disappear into pre-written roles on screen.
“I like the multidimensional nature of being able to conceive an idea, then pen it. There’s the lonely existence of a writer — which is so hermit-like – but then it opens into this shared mentality of bringing together a team to bring [the story] to life,” she says. “And then it gets lonely again in post [production], but being a part of that beautiful cycle was very, very appealing.”
Bell took the journaling and prose writing and dialogue sketches she’d been cataloging over the course of her career and began to mine them for story ideas. The first that popped up? A sharp-witted satire that dives into an obscure niche of Hollywood: the voice-over industry. Bell’s In A World would use screwball comedy and quick-hitting humor to mask an oddly empowering feminist narrative, all set within a world she had been fascinated by for some time.
“I think that I always am going to mine for a story that hides messaging that I believe in, and In a World is totally a secret manifesto for the feminist experience and how we perceive the ammunition of authoritative voice, which is still something that I soapbox about,” she explains. But her Sundance feature debut would have to wait. Despite being encouraged by her longtime agent to direct, Bell was hesitant to step behind the camera.
“I said, ‘I would never have the audacity to direct a full laid feature without having directed anything,’ Bell recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, then write a short film and direct that.’ And I literally stopped in my tracks. I was like, ‘That is an excellent idea.’”
Bell financed the short, titled Worst Enemy which focused on a female shut-in played by Michaela Watkins whose neurosis about her weight leads to an unfortunate incident with a girdle. It’s hilarious and awkward and, as Bell puts it, “a visual stamp” of how she wanted to tell stories. The short got nominated at Sundance and gave Bell enough of a confidence boost to helm her first feature, but the road to getting it made still wasn’t easy.
“It was at the time where actors, actresses weren’t writing and directing things,” she recalls. “It was almost before there was as much of an acknowledgment that there was a difficulty being a [female] filmmaker. It was almost before we were even talking about that in rooms.” Bell admits she’s seen a shift in that side of the conversation since.
“Now it’s terrific that there is this beautiful camaraderie that I have with other actors who have gained such success and really created beautiful pieces of work in a time where they feel empowered to do so,” she says. But, absent of that kind of creative revolution ten years earlier, it was on her to advocate for the stories she believed in.
“I walked into rooms and I just didn’t blink an eye. I wasn’t overthinking, ‘Ooh, I’m a female filmmaker trying to get something,’” she explains. “I had a very direct vision of what I wanted to do.”
And what she wanted to do was to churn out insightful, kind, and optimistic stories that gut-punched you with the raw, inescapable realities of life – stories that were funny and thought-provoking. It’s why, when her main character in In A World lands her dream voice-over job after fighting against the systemic sexism in her industry, Bell doesn’t let her enjoy the victory for too long. Her lead, Carol, soon learns that the studio selected her to narrate the trailer for an upcoming dystopia about a group of powerful Amazonian women simply because it was a good PR move – a nod to the kind of hollow feminism we’re still seeing today. Instead of letting that admission wreck her confidence and diminish her joy though, Carol decides to begin mentoring other women, teaching them how to literally harness the power of their own voice, abandoning that patriarchally-approved baby-speak for something stronger, more self-assured, and truer to their own femininity. So, a happy ending, but one that still manages to get the last dig in for good measure.
“There’s always an undercurrent of a bone I have to pick with society at large,” Bell laughs while explaining the film’s ending. That nagging feeling that she’s meant to use her lens to focus on societal issues we’d be more comfortable blurring into the background is partly why she signed on to direct two episodes of Hulu’s latest series, Pam & Tommy.
The show, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan, recounts the famous couple’s even more infamous sex tape leak, how that breach of privacy was tied to the rise of the internet itself, and the devastation it caused in both stars’ lives, but especially Anderson’s.
“I think why the context of it is so important is because we were all getting a lesson about where the boundaries lie in personal versus public and how image can sort of prevent and also taunt different boundary crossings,” Bell offers when asked why now felt like the right time to revisit that particularly thorny period in pop culture history. Despite the show launching with a raucous look at Pam and Tommy’s whirlwind romance, Bell’s episodes focus almost entirely on the psyche of the woman at the center of this media storm. In the show’s fourth episode, the first Bell directed, we see Pam reeling from this invasion of privacy, desperately trying to make her husband understand why the tape will damage her reputation but boost his own. She’s shrewd and realistic, predicting the backlash she’ll eventually endure. By the end of the episode, she’s suffered a terrible loss because of the stress she’s under and she reacts in a way that’s both incredibly heartbreaking to watch and, also, strangely inspiring.
In Bell’s second directorial effort of the series, Pam has fully come into her own, asserting herself at board meetings in the face of chauvinistic guidance that tries to belittle and diminish her experience and on talk show appearances opposite Jay Leno types who attempt to use this violation of her privacy as the punchline to some tawdry joke. She’s calm, collected, almost detached in the way she predicts her inevitable “fall from grace,” something that feels entirely relatable for any woman who’s been the victim of revenge porn – a term that wouldn’t be coined until after Anderson’s media trial.
For Bell, taking the reigns of this woman’s story felt personal and she fought to make sure that Pam had agency in this show, despite its entire premise focusing on how that agency was stolen from her by small men and their petty grievances.
“I’m always really interested in telling stories where women have to find their voice or get to sort of stand up for their own agency,” Bell explains. “And I felt really moved by what episodes I did get in this eight-part series because they are integral to Pam’s journey. Lily and I definitely bonded over the messaging and the voice that we could give this woman so that it felt like a feminist discussion — this idea that just because your career is successful because of being scantily clad in X, Y, and Z medium, it does not negate your right to privacy. That is something that I think women have been struggling to protect for just an incredibly long time.”
It must be noted that Anderson herself was not involved in the project and her feelings on its existence are still unknown. She may hate that her story is being re-told in this medium, that it’s being re-told at all. That’s fair and valid and something Bell has tremendous respect for.
“I would never force anyone to relive anything they didn’t want to,” she says when we broach the topic. But, as a storyteller who’s constantly looking to probe uncomfortable topics to find out why they stick in the societal subconscious and as a woman who’s experienced some of the same pushback and judgment, Anderson, herself went through, Bell sees it as her job to keep us talking about these unsettling issues – to even laugh about them at times – just so long as we’re not ignoring them.
“This story was acutely empathic to the plight of victims of this occurrence in our cultural history,” Bell says. “I just feel like there was this extreme sense of love and empathy and protectiveness over this woman’s story and what that meant to society at large. I felt really lucky that I got the opportunity to really take on a different visual language to express that and explore it in a new way.”
Bell hopes to continue challenging herself, finding new mediums and new stories that worm their way into our hearts, entertaining us even as they expose our own internal biases, making us laugh even as they offer some constructive criticism for fighting against the status quo. It’s her ability to embrace the duality of storytelling that makes her lens so unique and her films so memorable.