“This is a mistake mommy made,” Bell told her daughters after the near crisis.

Life can be measured by the lessons we learn, and Kristen Bell just learned a big one.

In a recent conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Bell revealed that “a couple of months ago, I set the trash can on fire on accident because I lit a candle and I didn’t wet the match before I threw it in.”

Bell described being “in the kitchen, cooking and smelling smoke.” She thought, “‘This isn’t burning, what is it?'” She opened up “the trash can, which is, you know, underneath the countertop… and then [realized] that the trash can is on fire.” The Veronica Mars and The Good Place star was able to extinguish the fire, and decided to turn it into a teachable moment for her daughters.

Amy Sussman/WireImage

Kristen Bell in 2024
“I sat my girls down,” Bell shared, and told them, “‘this is a mistake mommy made. It’s very easy to make. You gotta wet the match in order not to burn the house down.'”

It’s no surprise Bell handled the fire like a pro. She’s dealt with on-screen fires with aplomb a number of times, from the burning bush of the 2016 The Good Place episode “Tahani Al-Jamil,” to escaping a burning refrigerator she’d been trapped in on the 2005 Veronica Mars episode “Leave It to Beaver,” to her Heroes character Elle Bishop being able to summon lightning strikes and cause fires.

Bell has been married to the actor and podcaster Dax Shepard since 2013. The couple share two children – Lincoln, born in 2013, and Delta, born in 2014.

Bell and Shepard have been quite public about their parenting journey over the years. In a September appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Bell admitted that she and Shepard recently experimented with some “free-range parenting” on a trip to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, letting their daughters “just [run] around Copenhagen.” She claimed they “didn’t see them for seven hours,” which she described as “heaven.”

She also revealed in 2023 that she and Shepard let their daughters drink non-alcoholic beer, because Shepard, a recovering addict, “likes non-alcoholic beer, so he’d pop one open, he’d have Lincoln on his chest, and we’d walk and look at the sunset.”

Netflix

Kristen Bell and William Jackson Harper on ‘The Good Place’

Bell can soon be seen in the romantic comedy series Nobody Wants This with Adam Brody. The series follows the complicated yet blossoming romance between a lifestyle podcaster (Bell) and a progressive Rabbi (Brody), and will premiere on Netflix on Sept. 26.

Between them, Brody and Bell have starred in some of the most popular and long-running television series of all time, from Veronica Mars and Gossip Girl to The O.C. and Gilmore Girls. It’s good money to bet on this one working out too.

Watch Bell tell the fiery tale above.