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Maya Hawke joined her Inside Out 2 co-star Amy Poehler on the latter’s podcast Good Hang in a special sit-down where the duo discussed the movie’s billion-dollar impact.
Hawke played Anxiety in the Pixar sequel, and the character became an instant fan favorite, representing a new emotion that popped up as part of Riley’s coming-of-age journey. Joy (Poehler) and the rest of Riley’s more familiar emotions, meanwhile, had to grapple with their kid’s growth and impending teenagerhood in the film.
Inside Out 2 won so many hearts and filled movie theaters right when the industry—and seemingly the world at large—needed it the most. Hawke described the success of Inside Out 2 as a welcome surprise, “for something that makes a billion dollars and is good for the world; I don’t think there’s anything that does that.”
Poehler added, “The word ‘billion’ and ‘good for the world’ [don’t] go together.”
The duo attributed Inside Out 2‘s massive success to how its creative team focused on the multitudes a person can hold during adolescence, when so many things can feel so uncertain. However, anyone of any age can relate to holding space for a mix of feelings, as Hawke explained.
“The Joy-Anxiety relationship taught me a lot about showing love to that part of myself and allowing other people to see it so they can show it love,” she said. “A way to calm [your anxiety] down is inviting it into the conversation, looking at what it thinks and is worried about, and kind of addressing each point, and then offering it a comfortable chair and saying, ‘OK, you’re invited. I’m not trying to shut you out behind a door.’ Because that just works it up even more. The biggest thing I learned from doing this and being allowed to be welcomed into the beautiful world of this movie is to give my anxiety a comfy chair. I mean, anxiety might be the defining emotion of our time.”
Poehler agreed. “It was so fun to work on those characters together, because when the time is very scary, like these times, you want to find a way to tune in, check out, help yourself, and help other people. Like, you want to dip in and out. But when you’re just going, like, ‘toxic positivity,’ like, ‘this is great,’ it’s like, ‘Babe, things are bad. Things are real bad.'”
Hawke supplied, “Yes, then you still need to welcome in some [joy]. You’re not helping anybody if you shut out joy completely.”
Poehler pointed to a specific moment that resonated with her in Inside Out 2. “Riley, our character, has calmed herself down on the ice. She’s talked to her friends. She’s feeling a little bit like herself. She gets back on the ice. She starts skating. And Joy is being called back. And Anxiety does a little gesture of like ‘[right] this way.’ … It made me cry so hard. And I just thought, ‘Oh, like the tiny gesture of that is like what we must try to do during this bananas foster time we’re living in. Because that is whatever we can do, babe—to make room for each other.”
Watch the rest of the interview below:
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