Tone Bell

Tone Bell is an American actor and comedian whose television credits include NBC’s Whitney, Bad Judge, Netflix’s Disjointed, CBS’s Fam, Apple TV+’s Truth Be Told, and Freeform’s Single Drunk Female. He reached a wider network audience as R.J., the bartender and friend in Whitney, NBC’s sitcom starring and co-created by Whitney Cummings. The series ran for two seasons from 2011 through 2013, and Bell appeared with Cummings, Chris D’Elia, Zoe Lister-Jones, Dan O’Brien, and Maulik Pancholy. R.J.’s bar setting gave Bell a recurring place in the show’s central social circle rather than a one-off guest spot in its Chicago world. Bell followed Whitney with Tedward, the assistant in NBC’s legal comedy Bad Judge. The 2014–15 series starred Kate Walsh as Rebecca Wright, a Los Angeles criminal-court judge, and Bell’s character worked within its courthouse ensemble. In Netflix’s Disjointed, created by Chuck Lorre and David Javerbaum, he played Carter, an employee at Ruth’s Alternative Caring, a Los Angeles cannabis dispensary run by Kathy Bates’s Ruth Whitefeather Feldman. The 2017–18 series used a studio-audience format and included cannabis-policy discussions alongside its workplace comedy. Bell appeared with Bates, Elizabeth Ho, Aaron Moten, Elizabeth Sung, Chris Redd, and Dougie Baldwin across its two-part season on Netflix. In CBS’s Fam, Bell played Nick, the fiancé of Nina Dobrev’s character, Clem. The 2019 sitcom begins when Clem’s much-younger half-sister, Shannon, comes to live with the couple, forcing Nick to negotiate the family disruption as their wedding approaches. Bell subsequently joined Apple TV+’s Truth Be Told as Detective Bill Aames, appearing opposite Octavia Spencer’s true-crime podcaster Poppy Parnell. In 2022, he began playing Phil on Freeform’s Single Drunk Female, where Phil is Samantha Fink’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. Sofia Black-D’Elia played Samantha, who returns to her mother’s home after a public intoxication arrest. The series ran for two seasons. Outside scripted series, Bell has continued stand-up work. His half-hour set appeared in the third season of Netflix’s The Standups, released in 2018. Showtime premiered his special, Tone Bell: Can’t Cancel This, in 2019. He also appeared in the 2021 film The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels’s drama about singer Billie Holiday and the federal campaign against her. On Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, Bell played Coach Noble, a school coach at Sherman Oaks High. These credits show Bell’s repeated presence in ensemble storytelling.