When Lake Bell’s nude body, covered in a giant fake tattoo by her husband, Scott Campbell, appeared on the cover of New York’s latest fashion issue, her dad “wasn’t happy about it,” said the actress at last night’s Cut party. “He heard about it through friends and he was livid, but then he saw it and he was like, ‘I think this is beautiful … I don’t think this is lewd or anything.’ I think he even used the word badass.” Why hadn’t she warned him? “I didn’t want to get flak about it, and I just wanted to do something with Scott. It felt like a collaboration, like, I brought the frame and he brought the art. And it was our two-year anniversary when we did it,” she explained. “I didn’t feel like I had to tell anyone else, and that they’d find out in due time.”
So was it sexy to have her husband apply tattoos, well, everywhere? “I thought it was going to be super romantic when Scott was putting it on, but he was all business,” she said. “He was putting artwork on this very curvy canvas. And I would be like, ‘He he he,’ and he’d be like, ‘Stand still, you can’t laugh. Stop breathing.’” She did take it seriously, though. “I really just wanted to do him proud in this piece. I felt badly that I wasn’t just a little less round in certain areas, because artistically, I wanted the canvas to be a little leaner! But listen, it is what it is.” Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to eat anything before the shoot. “I couldn’t eat all day. By the end I was scarfing down food. You don’t want to eat while you’re naked.”
What will she do with the picture now? “It’s weird; you can’t frame it and put it in your house,” she said. “You’d look like a jerk. We could put it in the bathroom? I don’t know.” Did the experience make her feel more confident about nudity? “I subscribe to nudity occasionally when getting in the shower and perhaps when it makes sense for art, but otherwise I’m going to keep my clothes on in a public arena,” she said. “Even though everyone at this party has seen me naked!”