Chances are, you cried while watching Inside Out. Pixar’s 2015 masterpiece is, by its very nature, one of its most emotional works – not least due to its depictions of the emotions in the mind of youngster Riley. As it turns out, being in a Pixar film can be just as moving as watching them – as Maya Hawke found out in her Inside Out 2 audition. For the sequel, Hawke voices Anxiety, one of several new emotions that enters Riley’s head as puberty beckons – and even the process of delivering lines prior to getting the role brought tears to her eyes.
Yes, she cried in the audition. “There’s something about this story and these characters that I think really brings fundamental truths about our experience to the surface,” she explains. “It’s so relatable, so emotional, so pure, that whether you want to or not, you use what you have and what you’ve been through.” By the end of the audition, she was begging to get to play the part. “It was an extremely desperate thing to do, but I think what people are looking for in audition rooms is passion. That it means something to them personally, and they’ll put pieces of themselves into it,” Hawke says.
Right from the first time she laid eyes on the character design for Anxiety, Hawke felt an affinity for her. “She was pitched to me with a picture of her,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘YES, that’s ME! That’s the Velma Dinkley [of Scooby-Doo fame] part I’ve always dreamed of, with the orange and the skirt and stripes and the teeth!” Zoinks.
Read Empire’s full Maya Hawke interview – on playing Anxiety in Inside Out 2 – in The Acolyte issue, on sale Thursday 11 April. Order a copy online here. Inside Out 2 hits UK cinemas on 14 June.