Actress Kristen Bell has skipped her Today Show appearance after receiving fan backlash from her anniversary post on Instagram. Bell, 45, was scheduled to be interviewed on the popular NBC morning show on Wednesday, October 22, alongside fellow “Nobody Wants This” actress Justine Lupe, but Lupe appeared alone instead. Co-stars Jackie Tohn and Timothy Simons were interviewed as well later on the program. Bell’s absence comes amid a social media post that fans have called “insensitive.”
Fans call out Bell’s “tone-deaf” anniversary post
On October 17, Bell made a controversial post on Instagram, where the actress has over 15 million followers, with a strange caption celebrating the twelfth anniversary between her and comedian Dax Shepard.
The post, sharing a picture of the couple hugging on a bed, read, “Happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who once said to me: ‘I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.'”
Some commenters wrote that the post (which has not yet been deleted at the time of writing) was “tone-deaf” and a “crazy thing to joke about” given that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Others took a jab at Shepard saying that “he totally missed out on a lucrative career in greeting cards.”
That said, another user has since defended the post, saying that this is “their relationship and and their humor dynamic…Stop letting your brain look for all the ways something can be wrong!”
“The Good Place” actress revealed that she was going on a press tour for “Nobody Wants This” in an Instagram post on October 20 that has had made comments limited, which makes her absence on the Today Show more noticeable.
In September, Bell said on her husband’s “Armchair Expert” podcast that she regrets not having a “more sexually active” life.
