Dax Shepard became emotional while recalling Kristen Bell’s support when his dad was in the hospital in 2012.
“His room was an unending parade of many, many people, and they were all lovely and well-intentioned, but it put me in the position of them grieving and me having to comfort them,” Shepard, 51, recalled during a live conversation for Anderson Cooper‘s “All There Is With Anderson Cooper” podcast shared via CNN’s TikTok account on Wednesday, April 8. “I was starting to resent that I couldn’t just be in there with my dad. And I was starting to get really quite overwhelmed with that.”
For a few minutes, Shepard went to his car outside and called Bell, 45, so he could “just vent about it.”
“I was complaining, and she said, ‘It’s OK, I’m here. Look to the left,’” Shepard said while tearing up. “We live in California, and I’m in Detroit, and I look to my left, and she’s standing there, seven months pregnant.”
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He continued, “She had flown — she knew I was struggling — and she had flown and not told me and figured out where this hospital was. And was standing next to the car. What a champ, you know?”
Shepard shared that he and his wife went to visit with his father, who felt Bell’s growing baby bump. (At the time, Bell was pregnant with the couple’s eldest daughter, Lincoln. The pair welcomed daughter Delta one year later.)
During the conversation, Cooper went on to read a blog post Shepard had written in 2013 about his father’s death from cancer and Bell showing up.
“She lifted her shirt up and he put his hand on her swollen stomach. He left it there for the better part of an hour. He was smiling from ear to ear, sitting contentedly, unable to put together a sentence, but still capable of connecting to the new family member we were creating,” Shepard wrote at the time. “He wasn’t going to make it to the birth, but that didn’t get in the way of him meeting the new baby. It was an emotional and triumphant moment, one I will never forget.”
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He continued, “If I live to be 1,000, I will still be in debt to my wife for giving him that one last thrill.”
While emotional, Shepard quipped, “She’s a gangster, y’all.”
The couple have been candid through the years about their relationship, with Bell gushing over Shepard in March as she prepared to host SAG’s 2026 Actor Awards.
“There’s nothing that he won’t do to take care of me,” Bell told People ahead of the awards show. “One thing that I love so much about being married to him is that he is never allergic to me shining more and more. He never gets insecure about it.”
