During Sunday’s Critics’ Choice Awards, Kristen Bell (“Frozen II”) became the fourth recipient of the “See Her” award, which honors powerful women in media. (See the full winners list.) During her acceptance speech, the “Veronica Mars” and “The Good Place” star made reference to “crying at sloths” not once, but twice. In case you’ve been living under a rock up in a tree, Bell’s meltdown over a sloth is something that went viral in 2012 after Bell appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Watch the video above.
As Bell explained to DeGeneres, when she turned 31 her husband Dax Shepard wanted to get her “a present that no one else will ever get in their lifetime.” Shepard had told her to “grab the dogs and go in the back room,” and when she did that she was immediately overcome with the feeling that “there’s a sloth near.” At first Bell “didn’t know how to process” the thought of coming face to face with a sloth, because her “entire life had been waiting for this moment.”
The audience chuckled, but Bell quickly retorted, “I’m serious.” She detailed the moments when she was waiting for the sloth’s habitat to be set up in the other room, declaring she had a “full-fledged panic attack.” Luckily for the sake of all things viral, Shepard filmed the moment and shared it with the “Ellen Show” viewers.
At the end of the clip DeGeneres pretended to bring out a sloth and Bell’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “I’m so sorry!” DeGeneres shouted as she keeled over in a fit laughter.
Bell is the fourth recipient of the “See Her” award at the Critics’ Choice gala, following Viola Davis (2016), Gal Gadot (2017) and Claire Foy (2018). In her speech, Bell lovingly referred to the first three as “Human Goddess,” “Wonder Woman” and “The Queen.” “And I guess now me, the girl who cried at the sloth,” she joked.
Holding the trophy, Bell proclaimed, “Sometimes I do get asked what does it mean to be a woman today, and I respond always … by asking them to repeat the question so I can buy more time, because it is a really, really hard question. My immediate reaction is always to answer with words like strong and brave and powerful. But if I’m being honest, to me being a woman is not about being brave or being strong or being powerful. It’s not about being anything specific. It is just about giving yourself permission to be the things that you already are.”
Bell concluded her speech by saying, “Nobody is just one thing. We are all all the things. So thank you for this, for the reminder to see her and see myself in total: the brave parts and the cowardly parts and even the parts that cry at sloths.”
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