Maya Hawke revealed that she often reprises her “Inside Out 2” role as Anxiety in real life, using the character to comfort her friends’ children dealing with similar emotions.
Hawke opened up about her kind gesture during a sit-down on her “Inside Out 2” co-star Amy Poehler’s podcast “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” on Tuesday. Poehler stars as the main emotion Joy.
“That movie made people so happy and feel so seen,” Hawke said as the two started to share the joy they experienced doing the film.
“It’s been one of the great honors,” Hawke added. “My little sister was asking me the other day. She was like, ‘Do you get annoyed if someone asks you to do the Anxiety voice?’ And I was like, ‘No, not at all.’”
Hawke said that one of the things she loves most about the film is how it impacted adults and children, and that’s when she opened up about the random requests she receives from her friends. As she broke down an example scenario, she slipped into her character.
“I’ll get a call from a … friend of mine who is a parent … and [they’ll] be like, ‘Hey, would you do a recording, my kid’s going through this hard time. Would you record something in the voice for my kid?’” Hawke said. “I’ll be like, ‘Sure.’ I’ll turn on the little speaker and be like, ‘Hi! Oh, I know it’s really scary when parents have to go to the doctor’s office, and I know that makes you nervous, but the thing is, you just take a deep breath and trust that your daddy will be safe and that the doctors are going to take care of him.’ I will do things like that, and I don’t mind at all. I love it.”
Poehler said she completely relates to how Hawke feels.
“I know, I feel the same,” Poehler said. “You and I had a couple moments when we were doing press where we kept looking at each other like, ‘Woah, this feels so much bigger than us.’ The response of the movie was so beautiful, and I know that that is very rare to be in something good, that people like, that people go to see that is a good experience.”
“And that is good for the world,” Hawke chimed back in.
“Inside Out 2,” came out nearly 10 years after the first “Inside Out” landed in theaters in 2015. Hawke’s character Anxiety was one of the newest additions to the ensemble cast alongside newcomers Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
You can watch Hawke’s full “Good Hang” interview in the video above.
