Bell of the ball: Kristen Bell is having what Hollywood calls "a moment." She's on a hit show (Heroes), in a eat movie (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), and dating a new guy. And it couldn't happen to a cooler chick. This is truly one of the funniest interviews ever.(COSMO NEWS interview)(Cover story)

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Kristen Bell breezes into Vivian's Millennium Cafe in California's Studio City like she owns the place. And judging by the overjoyed reaction from the waitstaff, she just might. "Want a K. Bell spesh?" one of the waitresses asks the diminutive actress. The K. Bell special, it turns out, is an off-the-menu item that Kristen, who lives nearby, orders nearly every time she comes in, which is about three or four times a week. The waitress ticks off the ingredients, and Kristen responds with an enthusiastic "check" after each one, like a well-rehearsed comedy routine: "Rye, toasted." "Check." "Egg whites." "Check." "Tomatoes." "Check." "Avocado." "Check." "American." "Check." "Lettuce." "Check." "Mayonnaise." "Love you!"

A lot of people, especially actors, like it when they're described as down-to-earth, approachable, and easygoing. But it's hard to imagine anyone embodying these traits as legitimately as Kristen Bell does. The 27-year-old Michigan native's ability to flit easily between the smart and funny tomboy (like she did on the cult favorite TV series Veronica Mars), the mysterious femme fatale (on the hit NBC series Heroes), and the epicenter of romantic-comedy entanglements (in the new movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall) marks Kristen as a talent to be reckoned with. (She's even the voice of the mischievous faceless blogger on the CW'S Gossip Girl.) "It's funny," she muses. "The feedback I've .always gotten is that I was not nearly pretty enough to play the pretty girl and not homely enough to play the ugly girl. So I've 'always been like I've got to be able to fit in somewhere!'"

Kristen, who grew up just outside Detroit, admits that she was tomboyish like her character in Veronica Mars and a "very strange child" (at age 3, she announced to her parents that she was changing her name to Smurfette). Kristen would often eat her meals alongside her dogs ... with no hands. It's that kind of behavior, she says, that explains why she's been a vegetarian since she wits 11 years old. "I'm empathetic to a fault. I really do, embarrassingly enough, tear up when someone squishes a bug in front of me. So I couldn't disassociate my dog from a burger."

Now that she's a grown-up, Kristen is relishing playing, well, growaa-ups in her latest projects, Heroes and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. "I'm going to be 28 this year," she says. "I've consistently played about 10 years younger than I am. I've been looking for something different, and Heroes hit all those dots. My character was older, she was girlie, and she was wicked. Before that, I had only played sweet, ...