Actor Kristen Bell gave us a candid insight into her home life when she appeared on a recent episode of her husband Dax Shepard's podcast.
The American star of TV shows, The Good Place and Gossip Girl, introduced her family's flatulence by explaining that she and her spouse, Shepard, sleep in the same room as their 7 and 8-year old children.
Bell had splashed out on a snazzy, Ooler mattress, which uses a water-system to heat and cool the bed. But earlier in the week, during the family's evening ritual of watching TV before bedtime, Bell noticed what she euphemistically called 'a really raunchy smell'.
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“And I’m like, ‘Who’s farting?’ All three of them are like, ‘It’s me',” she said. “So, my whole family has gas, big [deal].”
Her spouse, and fellow Hollywood star, Dax Shepard, admitted that he thought himself the principal source of the offensive odours.
“I felt guilty because, minimally, I knew I contributed to it and perhaps was the leader of it,” he said.
But they eventually went to bed, hoping that the stench might clear over night.
“I wake up in the morning and I go, ‘Wow, nobody’s gas has dissipated, but it also smells like it’s burning’.”
This caused Kristen Bell to set the family to task on an extensive cleaning campaign, telling them to search for evidence that a stray animal might have had an accident. But even after airing the room, washing the linen and lighting several scented candles, the noxious fumes persisted.
“I’m like, ‘Does anybody else smell this, like, rotten garbage? Like burning garbage smell?’.”
Dax and Lincoln, aged 8, eventually lost interest in Bell's search, resulting in her feeling, quite literally, 'gaslit'.
But after hunting high and low, Kristen and Lincoln discovered the epicentre of the stench: Dax's 'feet corner' of the mattress. The smell caused her to 'almost pass out' and she was horrified when she realised the true source of the foul funk.
The bed needs to be occasionally filled with water and one night, in the darkness Shepard had topped the mattress up with what he thought was the glass of water by his bed. In fact, Shepard had mistakenly filled the expensive mattress with his day-old protein shake.
The couple went to extreme measures to try to expel the protein shake from the water mattress, eventually resorting to a power hose.
But the pad continued to whiff, inducing nightmares in Dax Shepard. When he finally woke and insisted on pouring the liquid out, the discovery sickened him.
They had been sleeping on a mattress filled with maggots. The couple have said that they will probably have to buy a new mattress...
Alex Fleming-Brown