The actress suffered a major injury while trying to impress her now husband.
These days Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard are happily married with two kids, but back in 2007, they had just met and the Like Father star was eager to find ways to impress her new man.
“You know when you’re in the beginning of a relationship, you want to seem way more normal – especially me, I wanted to seem way more normal than I actually was,” Bell admitted on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. “He loves motorcycles. I really wanted him to think that I also loved motorcycles a lot and so when we first started dating I decided to get my motorcycle license. I was like, ‘I got it. I’m going to show him how cool I am.’”
So, she took a course in secret and graduated after two weeks. She presented Shepard with her license and the accompanying photograph.
“He immediately started giggling, then he watched the flip camera,” the 38-year-old actress said. “He was way more concerned about the fact that both mirrors were torn off the bike, but I said, ‘Look, I rode hard.’”
Once she’d impressed the 43-year-old Parenthood star, Bell didn’t have any interest in continuing her motorcycle career.
“I’ve never ridden again. Never driven again, no desire,” she said, before holding up her wedding ring and adding, “Look, we’re married. I can tell you. I don’t want to drive those things. They are terrifying.”
While she's no longer riding herself, Bell did have to get on the back of Shepard’s bike while the two were filming the romantic comedy When in Rome, which hit theaters in January 2010.
At one point, Shepard got off the bike and noticed Bell was crying. She’d been trying to hold in the pain of a serious injury for about four miles.
“I was wearing linen pants and I touched the side of the bike. It burnt a hole through my linen pants and gave me a very serious second-degree burn, the muscle was exposed,” she recalled. “But I was so desperate, because he said to me as we stepped on that bike, ‘Careful ‘bout your legs on the side it gets really hot.’ And I’m like, ‘I know!’ But I didn’t know.”
When Kimmel asked what her goal was in keeping quiet, Bell replied, “My goal was to bag Dax Shepard, Jimmy.”
These days, Bell -- who's been married to Shepard since 2013 -- isn’t afraid to show her true self to her husband, who recently posted a picture of her in the pool wearing gloves.
“I would call it a very serious, undiagnosed and yet to be discovered medical condition that tens of people in America might also suffer from,” she joked, adding she can’t stand the ridges of her finger tips when they are wet.
A friend got her the gloves after she realized the significant problem with her phobia.
“When your children are in the pool, you need to grab them, especially my youngest, like a bulldog, she just sinks,” Bell noted. “The problem is, my very serious medical condition makes me want to step back. And I don’t want to grab my kid. And I’m like, well this can’t happen.”
She went on to proudly declare, “I’m not ashamed because in my lifetime I want to remove the stigma of the maybe 10 people who suffer from this.”
For more from the adorable couple, watch the clip below:
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