Kristen Bell remembers being told she wasn’t pretty enough to act

Fashion mavens and VHS haters aren’t the only ones who are glad the '80s are long gone—Kristen Bell is happy that the world has moved on from some of the more terrible things the decade once boasted too. Like, typecasting every female actor in Hollywood and trying to fit them into certain boxes, for one. The Good Place star revealed in a new interview with Vanity Fair that when she was starting out as an actress she was often told she wasn’t pretty enough or geeky enough for roles. As film buffs might remember, those were two trends started by a certain coming-of-age filmmaker whose movies were quite popular in the 1980s (okay obviously it was John Hughes).“It's not the '80s where you have to have the popular girl and then the nerd who gets the guy. It's not that anymore and I'm really grateful for that,” Bell said in the video, which takes a bigger look at her career. “It opens up a lot of opportunities for everyone to play and pretend, which is the most fun part.”[video_embed id='1838092']RELATED: The sparks didn’t fly when Kristen Bell met Dax Shepard[/video_embed]Bell isn’t exactly known for holding back (fans tend to adore her for her total honesty about marriage, motherhood, depression, her love of sloths and other such important things), but in this interview she’s brutally honest about the challenges that she faced because of… well, her face. “I would get feedback from an audition: ‘Well, you’re not pretty enough to play the pretty girl, but you’re not quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl,'” she said. “I was like ‘OK so does that just mean I can’t be an actor? What does that mean?’ That’s what I was getting feedback on in every single audition.”Clearly things turned around for the actor, especially when she was cast as Veronica Mars in 2004. From there she went on to parlay that sleuthing coming-of-age character into a zillion other interesting roles, including Anna on Frozen, the snobby yet neurotic actress in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the notorious voice dishing on Gossip Girl's upper east side crew.“I think as I’ve grown older, those boxes have changed and they’ve almost gone away,” Bell added. “It’s this huge gray area now of all these beautiful stories you can tell that have dimensional people that don’t have to be one thing.”That was certainly true of Bell’s latest TV project, The Good Place, which just ended earlier this year after four seasons on NBC. It’s probably the first time the world has followed a leading lady as unlikeable as the shrimp-popping Eleanor Shellstrop, yet for as many bad qualities as the character had she had just as many good ones. It’s those kinds of roles that Bell has fought for over the years, and they’re one of the many reasons she was chosen to receive the #SeeHer award at the 2020 Critics Choice Awards."My immediate reaction is always to answer with words like 'strong' and 'brave' and 'powerful,' but if I'm being honest, to me, being a woman is not about being brave or being strong or being powerful. It's not about being anything specific," Bell said while receiving the award, which celebrates women who push boundaries in TV and film and embrace the importance of real female roles."It's just about giving yourself permission to be the things that you already are — which seems very easy, but it is not. Because women have been conditioned to fit into boxes — usually tiny, pretty, sparkly boxes with bows on them, generally. So to me, the idea of womanhood is someone who sheds the perfect little box and owns their complexity.”That’s Bell for you—unwrapping those sparkly boxes one at a time and sharing the resulting (and sometimes complex) joy with the rest of the world.[video_embed id='-1']BEFORE YOU GO: Brother and sister try out a new Snapchat filter with hysterical results[/video_embed]