This may be the first you've heard of the curiously named Lake Bell. But, as they say, still waters run deep, and the writer, director and star of last year's award-winning
In A World... is about to surface as Hollywood's next major multi-talent
"Lake Erie? Lake Superior? The Great Lakes? What's it gonna be?"
Her mouth racing to keep up with her hyperactive thought process, Lake Bell is musing about how our interview will be headlined. She is what Variety would call a fast-rising Hollywood hyphenate, an actress-writer-director whose career took a great leap forward in 2013 with her whip-smart directorial debut, the voice-over comedy, In A World... and who's going to be seen a lot more this year thanks to starring roles opposite the likes of Owen Wilson, Jon Hamm and Simon Pegg, with whom she's currently shooting the romcom Man Up. But were sub-editing her calling, she'd probably succeed there as well.
"I've heard them all," she laughs. "Lake Titicaca? I've always loved that one. It's got titty and caca in it. When you're a kid that wins. You cannot top it."
As the man said, there's some rum work pulled round the font and Bell, 34, is curious as to why aquatic inspiration should have struck her parents when the rest of her siblings all lean to the Luke, Courtney, Gilbert ordinary. "I think they were just high," she -concludes. "When I moved to Hollywood, everyone assumed it was a stage name. No. My parents were just high."
She carries it off, though. Arriving at our rendezvous, a hip East London coffee shop, peopled by the usual cast of Grapes Of Wrath extras and Twenties longshoremen, she breezes in wearing a long black coat and fedora. She's tall, confident and strikingly good-looking. "I've just come from the shoot," she says. "Bit too glam?"
Not at all. Fish out of water she may be here, but she's something of an Anglophile (she's driven four different Minis), having studied drama in London, and is constantly looking for ways to make her role in Man Up, where she plays an English woman who mistakenly meets Pegg on a blind date, more accurate.
In A World... focused on what's conveyed by a voice (it enabled her to vent about what she calls "the American female pandemic of 'sexy baby vocal virus'") and the particularity of accent. She's determined to get hers dead on. Does she have an area in mind for where her character's from? "Wandsworth."
That's very specific. "Yes. Not too posh, not too [locates accent Albert Square-wards] salt of the earth. Know what I mean?"
She delights in dipping into the English vernacular. When a screaming infant interrupts her train of thought for the nth time, she mutters, "This baby is taking the piss." After her husband, the tattoo artist, Scott Campbell, drops in briefly then departs to wait outside (she's running him to the airport after our interview) she declares, "Isn't he fit?", savouring the word itself almost as much as my uncomfortable, British reaction.
English. American. Writer. Actor. Director. Chief sub. Whether it's in "a balls-out action thriller" with Owen Wilson (The Coup) or a true-life story of a down-on-his-luck sports agent
Jon Hamm (Million Dollar Arm) - "I promise, you'll take those glasses off and cry" - or simply bad-mouthing babies, she's worth watching. Lake Superior.
Definitely.
