If there’s one thing House of Lies viewers have learned about Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his “pod” at Galweather & Stearn, it’s that they’ll go to any lengths necessary to get the job done. So now that the company’s merger with MetroCapital has gotten the green light, expect the quartet to go to even greater extremes to save themselves.

“Their backs are truly against a wall,” Ben Schwartz told reporters earlier this week. “They’re scrambling to get air and not die, and killing anybody they can to get air.”

However, Marty’s problems aren’t limited to the boardroom. In Sunday’s season finale (10/9c on Showtime), he is also headed for a heated courtroom battle with his ex-wife and work rival Monica (Dawn Olivieri) over their son Roscoe. “The merger, while very important, is not as important as the things that happen between the characters,” series boss Matthew Carnahan said. “What happens… leaves everything… in a terrible state of disarray.”

Carnahan, along with stars Schwartz and Josh Lawson offered six other teases for the season finale, Season 2 and beyond:

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Kristen Bell was at last summer’s Television Critics Association party for Showtime as she was just starting to film “House of Lies.” I asked her a few questions then, but now that I’ve seen the show I know how naughty she gets to be. On the TCA panel for the show’s premiere in January, I asked her some more informed questions, and included the two from last summer below as well.

Crave Online: How are you enjoying the naughty talk on the show?
Kristen Bell: Let’s just say I’m enjoying it. I’m f***ing enjoying the hell out of it. Sorry. No, it’s more provocative than anything I’ve ever done. And sometimes I have a potty mouth, and it’s just nice to not have those limitations.

Crave Online: Is the pace of “House of Lies” even faster than “Veronica Mars”?
Kristen Bell: I would say yes. Keeping up with the three of them and the dialogue that they write, yeah, I would say it’s a little bit faster.

Crave Online: Were you looking for another TV show and is cable very different from your network experiences?
Kristen Bell: I think so. I think that they’re not under the same restraints as network. They can go a little further with their subject matter, with what they show, with how provocative they are. So yeah, I think it is a little bit more interesting and I had my eye, I was looking for something to come back to TV.

It’s like a feeling like I’ve been away from home for too long and I love doing movies, but I look at TV like high school and movies like camp. You create these great relationships in movies in movies and then they sort of dissipate and you go on your way. I like knowing the crew that I work with, I like coming to the same job every day so it appeals to my emotional stability a lot more.

I think whatever you do that works, if you have good writers they pick up on it right away and they continue to write that for you.

Crave Online: Has that happened?
Kristen Bell: I think so. I don’t know, I’m not in the writer’s room but I hope that they’ve seen, “Oh, that works for her and that doesn’t.” I love where my character is going. I love it. It’s not like anything I’ve ever had before.

CraveOnline.com

After standing up for the underdog as the titular teenage private eye in Veronica Mars, Kristen Bell continues the good fight as a vocal LGBT ally. Currently starring as a smart and sassy management consultant on Showtime’s House of Lies — and as a news reporter in the big-screen whale tale Big Miracle — the 31-year-old Burlesque beauty and Gossip Girl narrator opens up for the first time about how marriage inequality has stalled her plans to wed fiancé Dax Shepard.

The Advocate: When did your relationship with the LGBT community begin?
Kristen Bell: I’ve always done musical theater, but I wasn’t necessarily aware of gay people while growing up in Michigan. I knew I was attracted to a certain male personality, but it was an unwritten love because no one in my high school was out of the closet. That’s why attending NYU was such a wonderful, joyous musical theater experience for me: About 70% of my friends during college were gay.

How did your upbringing inform your views on LGBT issues?
I didn’t know anyone who was openly gay, so it wasn’t addressed. I wasn’t taught to treat gays with respect; I was taught to treat everyone with respect, so I never grew up with a prejudice against any race or sexual orientation, and that’s the gift I was given. When I got to New York, I was like, “Wow, gay people are awesome!” It was a sort of celebratory acknowledgement of the acceptance my parents talked about.

You’ve supported Friendfactor, a social media website that connects straight allies with LGBT causes. You even wore an Old Navy gay pride T-shirt to the May 2011 launch event in New York.
Fuck, yeah. You bet your balls, I did. I hosted that event with Chelsea Clinton because I thought it was absurd that New York hadn’t passed a marriage equality bill yet. In about 10 years, knock on wood, I think we’re going to be embarrassed as a nation about our behavior on this issue. It’s going to be exactly like what happened in 1970, when people were like, “Whoa, 1960 sucked. We should’ve let everyone ride the bus.”

Friendfactor founder Brian Elliot mentioned in an interview that you dedicated your own Friendfactor Friend-setter page to one of your best gay friends.
I dedicated it to my friend Greg, who I went to college with. He’s been one of my best friends since 1998, and I love and adore him. After I moved to New York, a lot of lovely men and women that I knew started to come out of the closet, because they felt comfortable being in an atmosphere that was finally accepting of them. It breaks my heart when I think about what some of my gay friends have gone through. I’ve heard them say things like, “But I’m wrong, I’m a disappointment,” and none of it’s true, of course. There’s so much bullshit that idiots preach. No matter what your beliefs are, nobody is bad or wrong because of the way that they were born. Why anyone would tear anyone else down, especially for reasons that are so intimate, is beyond me. It almost doesn’t infuriate me as much as it confuses me.

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Kristen Bell was on the talk show “Chelsea Lately” this week – watch her interview below!

In her latest movie, Big Miracle, Kristen Bell helps save the whales. And in her current TV show, House of Lies, the actress swims with sharks. Meanwhile, there is a video going around the Internet of her freaking out over a sloth. What’s the deal with Bell and animals? Vulture phoned the actress to get her insight into mammals, including her thoughts on codpieces and toe fetishes.

So that video going around of you freaking out over a sloth …
Dax [Shepard, her boyfriend] brought a sloth to me for a few hours as a birthday present. I’ve always loved sloths. It was one of the best days of my life almost to the point where I couldn’t handle it — it was that exciting. I lost my mind.

Are sloths indeed lazy?
It depends on how you look at it. They can’t be lazy, because they’re never not lazy. Their metabolism is so slow. They live in the trees. And they have to shimmy down a tree, which of course takes hours. They poop, like, once a week. And they have to rub their bum on the ground to get their digestive system running.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned about whales making Big Miracle?
[Pause.] What I learned …

For instance, I’ve heard that female whales get around — they aren’t monogamous.
Whales rape. They do. I don’t know if that’s the only way sex happens in their species, but I do know it takes two or three males to corner a female in order to impregnate her, which I personally consider rape [laughs]. You want the species to survive, so there’s cognitive dissonance there.

Your dad was a news director. What did you learn from him in playing a reporter in this movie?
I wish, in retrospect, that I had asked him how this event [based on a real 1988 Alaskan whale rescue] affected him. And I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t. I grew up going to the station with him and being able to play with the TelePrompTers, knowing the behind the scenes of news directing. And it’s very similar to acting. He had a lot of hesitancy because he knew the rejection that was possible. He had been the one forced to reject people.

In addition to the sloth video, you’re apparently also newsworthy this week for the erroneous headline “Kristen Bell Enjoyed Sucking Toe,” in reference to a House of Lies scene.
I was asked how uncomfortable it was getting my toes sucked. And I said, “It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I anticipated.”

How does one prepare for that type of scene?
Well, obviously a pedi is mandatory. It’s much like any preparation of intimacy on-camera: You have to do everything you can think of. In order to make him comfortable, I brought a bowl and a sponge and a wash cloth and washed everything right in front of him. Because I would be thinking, Is this girl gonna have toe jam? What’s going inside that shoe?

Do people check out your feet now?
I don’t know that people look at my feet. I have seen comments on Twitter or otherwise about my foot or feet in general. I don’t realize it was as much of a fetish. Feet are pretty gnarly. It’s rare that you come across a nice set of toes.

Quentin Tarantino has a well-documented foot fetish. Maybe you can parlay this into a film role.
Does he love feet? He embraces it? Oh my gosh. Wow.

House of Lies also had you dancing in your underwear on-camera. Was that worse?
The only thing more vulnerable than dancing on-camera is dancing in your underwear. Your moves are immortalized. Especially because it was supposed to be erotic. Not my forte. I can do cute till the end of the day, but sexy is a whole different thing to embrace. I’m not Christina Hendricks. And I’m not even dancing to music — they laid that in after. You couldn’t imagine how awkward that was: no music, I’m in my underwear, and there’s 40 stinky crew members in the room. But I kind of just had to go for it.

How much do you know about your character’s background ahead of this show?
I was really only given what I needed for each episode. Jeannie was not a huge role in the pilot. I had been told, “Oh, she’s gonna have this great story line.” Truth be told, that’s what everyone tells you when you start a show. But I like the show. Even if I was just there to support Don Cheadle’s character, I was fine with it. But you do learn a hell of a lot about Jeannie in the upcoming episodes.

The show will continue to tap into her moral ambiguity?
Yes, you learn why she can be so inviting and cutthroat. You learn why she’s kind of obsessed with Marty [Cheadle’s character] but wants his job. She has a past that she’s ashamed of, and she cannot come to terms with things in her life until she works those issues out. And I have sympathy for that.

Looking ahead, will you be visiting your old TV character, the chilly robotic caterer Uda Bengt, in a Party Down film?
I think they’re working on it. I don’t know that I’ll be a part of it because I wasn’t one of the main characters. But I still am very close to all those guys, and I know that they want it to happen.

It’s not a Party without Uda!
That’s what I said!

I noticed that you’re playing Supergirl in an upcoming comedy called Movie 43. As a comics-nerd crush object, is that fulfilling any childhood fantasy for you?
I think my reason for loving superheroes is having Comic-Con fans because Veronica Mars was such a cult hit. It’s exciting to me to have such an original group of people like what you do. There’s nothing mainstream about the Comic-Con fans; they are just more interesting. I like a little bit of weird and a lot of originality and a lot of heart. And that is a definition of a geek.

On a more serious note, you were very active in the last campaign for Barack Obama. Do you have plans to be as involved during this campaign?
I’m a Democrat. I know that. If I’m there, it’s to support the Democratic party. I will be there.

Is that to say you’re currently hoping the president has a second term?
[Giggles.] Over the clown race? Yeah. Yeah. I’m hoping it’s Obama.

Who is the alpha clown in the clown race?
Oh God, you’re gonna get me into so much trouble. Here’s what I do know: I don’t share the same views as a lot of the GOP candidates. I genuinely don’t want to offend anyone. My goal is for more equality for everyone. And I’ll get shit from my publicist if I run my mouth.

NYMag.com

Kristen Bell can relate to her character in the new Ken Kwapis film Big Miracle. In this true tale about ‘Operation Breakthrough,’ in which three gray whales were trapped and then freed from the ice in Alaska, Bell plays a young journalist in search of the story that will make her career. Bell, who rose to fame when she starred on the hit TV show “Veronica Mars,” knows competition. Sure, she’s starred in a bunch of movies, and was even able to get on another show with Don Cheadle (“House of Lies”), but she’s aware that there’s always someone out waiting to take her job. We recently spoke to the actress, and she shared all sort of things. Did you know her dad was a newscaster? She told us that’s the reason she speaks in soundbites.

What was it that originally drew you to the script?
Kristen Bell: Initially, the fact that it was about animals. I thought, in simple terms, “Oh, I like animals.” Then upon reading it, the complexity of the story, it seemed almost unbelievable to me. I was like, “Oh really, a hundred and eighty journalists from different countries flew in and two million dollars was spent on this, really, and people got married who met talking about the whales? Give me a break Kwapis.” And he said that the most outrageous portions of the movie are the truth. I just felt like it was as story that needed to be told. The inspiration factor behind it was the most important thing to me. There’s so few times in history when everybody wakes up at the same time or everybody works together. We are so into having enemies as humans. We are so interested in the us and them of it all that it’s phenomenally rare to have everybody check their baggage at the door and work together and it is so powerful, I think.

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In Big Miracle, Kristen Bell plays a young but driven reporter sent to cover a major story unfolding in the Alaskan wilderness. When we recently met with Kristen in LA to talk about the movie, which filmed on location just outside of Anchorage, she told us she was up for the challenges the role presented. Not only did she grow up in Detroit, where the Winters are notoriously harsh, but as an actress, she said she could relate to her character’s ambition as well as her career setbacks. Kristen also talked about what it was like to be caught in an onscreen love triangle between Drew Barrymore and her longtime friend John Krasinski, and a magical moment during the shoot that left her feeling “insignificant.”

House of Lies’ leading lady Kristen Bell stopped at Sundance to tell us about playing a “professional liar” in the new “perverted” dark comedy. Plus, find out which Big Miracle costar she said couldn’t take the Alaskan cold and hear how she stays fit by eating leftover pizza in our fun one-on-one interview at the Bing Bar!