Kristen Bell’s Alleged ‘Gossip Girl’ Salary Is Mind-Blowing — But Is It True?
“Where do you know Kristen Bell from?” might be a question designed to reveal someone’s age and style preferences.
Older millennials who were angst-filled teens at the time will likely forever associate her with the iconic teen noir Veronica Mars — a series so popular that its fans managed to support first a movie sequel and then a series reboot more than a decade after the show’s original conclusion. Today’s teens will likely recognize her as the voice of Anna from their beloved childhood favorite Frozen. Modern comedy fans will think of her as Eleanor from The Good Place.
The fact that Bell has often become so associated with the characters she plays is a testament to her acting skills and generally infectious personality. It turns out that even when there isn’t a face to go along with her performance, she still manages to make a splash. Now she’s making headlines for the alleged salary she pulled in for voicing the title character in Gossip Girl.
Kristen Bell started on the stage before turning to television and film
Born in 1980 in Michigan, Bell started studying musical theater while in college. As Biography.com reports, she made her Broadway debut before turning her talents to television.
Her early work consisted of small roles that didn’t get her a lot of attention. She played an unnamed assistant in Pootie Tang in 2001 and an unnamed friend in People are Dead in 2002. A string of small guest roles on television series followed and included an appearance in The Shield and Deadwood.
It didn’t take long of climbing her way through these entry-level jobs, however, for Bell to find her breakthrough role. When she was cast in the lead as Veronica Mars, the teenage private eye with an impossibly dramatic life, her career trajectory would change in a major way. She followed it up with roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Fanboys, and Heroes.
These days, she and her husband Dax Shepherd are thriving personalities in their own right in addition to being sought-after actors.
‘Gossip Girl’ premiered in 2007
In 2007, Gossip Girl premiered and took the world — especially the coveted teen television audience — by storm. The series is set in the Upper East Side of New York and follows the lives of several privileged teens.
If you ask a fan to name notable characters from Gossip Girl, you’ll probably hear the names Blair Waldorf and Serena Van Der Woodsen. These BFFs with tension are the central focus of the show’s drama — and there’s plenty of gossip to go around. Backstabbing, lying, and betrayal are common themes that keep viewers on the edge of their seats and taking sides.
Through it all, though, there’s a voice. The show’s title comes from an anonymous blogger who is keeping tabs on these juicy details and sharing them with the world through her posts. This unseen “Gossip Girl” narrates the series and is voiced by none other than Kristen Bell.
Was Kristen Bell’s ‘Gossip Girl’ salary really that high?
Lately, Bell’s time for Gossip Girl has been getting some viral attention. A TikTok video posted by user @parkerwest went around to start this trend. He was responding to another TikTok user named @donceptofficial who asked people to “name a job where the amount of work and amount of pay do not match.” This TikToker gives Kristen Bell’s pay for Gossip Girl as an example and goes on to say, “The day I found out how much she made I wanted nothing to do with the life that I have.”
Whoa! Those are pretty strong words, so what is he referring to? Well, an article on The Cinemaholic about Bell’s net worth includes a line that says, “Her salary for each episode of the show is about $125,000.” It seems that @parkerwest interpreted this to mean that Bell was paid that much for voicing Gossip Girl. He goes on to say that, since there are 121 episodes of the show, Bell was paid over $15 million for the series.
Of course, that would be astonishing, but a closer inspection of the cited article reveals that amount was how much Bell made for her current (at the time of publication) participation in the series The Good Place. As the star of a popular network sitcom late in its run, that salary makes a lot more sense. There is nothing to indicate that Bell was paid that much for her voice work on Gossip Girl. In fact, since the very same article lists her entire net worth at $20 million, it’s clear that she did not make that much from Gossip Girl alone.
