Kristen Bell worships 'Heroes'

Kristen Bell will make her much-hyped debut on Heroes next week, but as she puts it, the appearance will be "a little bit of a tease."

"I start in episode five [which airs Monday], and then I'm not in six or seven, which I guess is sort of part of the mystery," Bell says. "At least that's what I'm saying."

The Veronica Mars star does promise, though, that her character, Elle, will be back for a good long while starting with the season's eighth episode. Bell, a self-professed "huge fan" of the series, has signed for 13 episodes this year, and both she and the show's producers seem open to the idea of having her around longer than that.

"This has been a great relationship so far. And there was no hesitancy with entering as far as becoming a main part of the show, just ... from both ends it was like, 'Let's feel each other out and see how you fit into the show and if you're happy,'" Bell says. "... So, you know, I'll be one of the ones that keeps my fingers crossed that I won't get killed."

When we meet Elle, she's in Ireland on the trail of Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia), but she's connected to others as well. Bell and Heroes creator Tim Kring chatted with reporters earlier this week about the character's back story, the season two arc and Bell's ongoing geek education.

Elle's background

Bell: I can't reveal her secret powers. You'll have to watch next Monday. But it's a very cool power.

She has ties to HRG [Jack Coleman] and Claire [Hayden Panettiere] ... But she also has ties a little bit to Suresh. And she's a little messed up in the head, which makes her really manipulative and always out to get what she wants. She doesn't have many boundaries. ... She very much enjoys her power and enjoys the emotional power it gives her over other people.

Kring: The one thing that we will say is that ... this character is tied to this company that we have talked about for the last year on the show that Claire's father was involved with. And so one of the ideas was that this character ... is actually raised within the Company. It's in some ways a cautionary tale of what would happen to any of our characters had they lived with their powers their whole life the way Elle has.

Was that Joanna Cassidy in the photo of the elders? And will we see more of those people?

Kring: Yes on almost all of those accounts. We will be seeing the people in the photo. I think all of them will be [played by the same people], which I just have to tell you, the photo has got a life of its own. Logistically it was so difficult to actually come up with this photograph that's used now and refers to things that are shot well in the future here; it was very difficult to get that all lined up. But yes, the photo is as accurate as we can make it. And it did look an awful lot like Joanna Cassidy in there.

Re-starting the story in season two

Kring: You know, one of the problems with starting a season is that you have to start everything at pretty much at the same time, or at least that's the impulse.

And on a show like ours where there's a lot to cover, it can get a bit cluttered. But we have now settled into a pattern of telling fewer stories [in each episode], and I think which allows for a more -- a deeper sort of experience with the show with each one of these stories. But one of the pressures becomes the balancing act of people coming in and people sitting out. ...

And part of what happens on any show is that you enter a relationship with your viewers where you teach them how to watch your show and they teach you what they seem to be responding to. So for us, I think we are in this process right now of teaching the audience how to get used to the idea that not everybody is going to be in every single episode.

[The previous] episode was a great example of it. We didn't have Hiro [or] Peter Petrelli in last night's episode and others. But those are two big storylines that we followed from the very beginning of the season. ... And I don't think that you really miss seeing them for one episode because you know that their stories will pick right up where they left off last time.

Kristen Bell, fangirl

Bell: Oh wow, my geeky guilty pleasures? Certainly Comic-Con would be a geeky guilty pleasure. I think the geekiest of all my pleasures at Comic-Con is I'd definitely try to go around and get pictures with every single person who dresses up. Because the people come in full costume. They just fascinate me, absolutely fascinate me. ...

I don't know. I mean certainly having done Fanboys [a feature film about Star Wars geeks due out in January], anything Star Wars is now sort of wonderful and fascinating to me. ... I'm sort of still learning. And I have like all my friends are fanboys. So it's not so much that I'm like typically going out on my own as much as I am learning from them and have just been so embraced by this community that I love it.

And now I'm sort of coming into my own as a fangirl and seeking things out -- like the New Beverly [Cinema] in Los Angeles had a double feature the other night of Tron and the Last Starfighter. So I was like, I kind of need to see that at least just once in my life because that seemed like an awesome double feature, you know?

If Bell didn't already have the hearts of Geek Nation, that pretty well has to seal it. Her stint on Heroes begins at 9 p.m. ET Monday on NBC.

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