There have been plenty of epic prank stories to come out of movie and TV sets over the decades. Cole Sprouse and David Schwimmer played one on Friends that actually made the final cut, and George Clooney is infamous for them. Apparently, Kristen Bell enjoys a good prank herself, and her co-star Justine Lupe got her good with a truly disgusting ruse when they filmed Nobody Wants This Season 2.
Nobody Wants This boasts tons of comedic talent as one of the best shows to binge on Netflix, so it’s not a huge surprise that one of the most uniquely twisted pranks I’ve heard of in a while would come from the minds of its actors. Justine Lupe — who plays Morgan, the younger sister of Kristen Bell’s Joanne — told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that she decided Bell’s obsession with biohacking was the perfect launching point for the trick, saying:
I was like, ‘OK, how can we marry these two things together?’ The biohacking and the prank. We settled on, ‘Let’s convince her that I’m drinking my own pee.’
So how did Justine Lupe go about doing this? Over the course of two months — “Two months!” Kristen Bell emphasized — Lupe made fake A.I. articles about the health benefits of drinking urine. She also would stage phone calls with members of the crew asking them to bring her thermos of urine to set.
Kristen Bell said her on-screen sister really put in the work, too, miming how Justine Lupe would sniff the contents of the thermos (which was actually chamomile tea, according to Lupe), cringe and then hold her nose before taking a sip.
The Veronica Mars vet said she was worried about her friend, even going so far as to call YouTube’s Dr. Mike to see if that was even safe. Again, this went on for weeks before the long con was revealed. Lupe continued:
The grand finale of the prank was that I steeped chamomile tea at different gradients and put them in a mason jar, and I brought them to set, and I brought them to her and I said, ‘Kristen, I brought you some of my best pee. And I ate all the good minerals, so it’s, like, the best-quality pee you could ever have.’
Kristen Bell took over the story at this point, explaining how she didn’t want to be rude to her co-star but that there was no way she was accepting a mason jar of urine. Bell said:
At this point my co-dependency is, I’m jumping out of my skin and I’m just going, ‘How do I tell this girl that I love so much that I think this is unsafe and also I do not want this urine, I’m not going to take it home and I want to tell her to stop doing this, but I don’t want to tell her what to do, but I want to make sure she’s being safe? Oh my god, this is so much pressure.’ And I just said, ‘I don’t want this.’ And then she said, ‘April Fool’s,’ and it was April 1.
You have to respect the commitment. That was a pretty long way for Justine Lupe to go for an April Fool’s Day joke. You can see her full retelling of it below:
Nobody Wants This Season 2 hit the 2025 TV schedule last month, and even though it’s failed to get the same positive response as its first season, Kristen Bell and Adam Brody were still able to serve up an emotional ending. This 10-episode batch also featured a guest appearance from Brody’s real-life wife Leighton Meester, and who can pass up seeing Seth Cohen and Blair Waldorf share the screen?
All episodes are available to stream now, and be sure to check out what else is coming soon to Netflix.
