The latest Pixar movie Inside Out has continued to perform well at the US box office, beating even the much-hyped Terminator Genisys despite that film’s more recent release. It’s testament to the importance of compelling story-telling to a movie’s financial chances, given that Inside Out has also enjoyed a much better critical reception than Terminator. Clever casting can help with this – and much thought has clearly been put into the choices of leading voice actors for Inside Out.
So, who are these voice actors?
If you have somehow managed to escape much of the publicity about Inside Out, here is a brief introduction to the movie. It focuses largely on the five personified emotions of a young girl called Riley: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust, voiced respectively by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Bill Hader, Lewis Black and Mindy Kaling. Many of these names will be easy for many of us to recognize – and watching this video of these actors together could further jog your memory.
How Joy, Fear and Disgust found their comedic voices
As Inside Out is a comedy-drama, it should hardly surprise that all of these actors have notable experience in comedy. But what makes each of them special for the particular emotions that they voice? Let’s start with Amy Poehler, as Joy largely dominates the movie posters. According to Hader, she first heard that Pixar wanted her for the movie when he called her on the studio’s behalf. He remembers telling her: “You’re right for the part — you are Joy.”
While on the subject of Hader, he considers himself a good fit for the voice of Fear, being – by his own admission – a “pretty anxious guy”. Meanwhile, Mindy Kaling was cast for Disgust shortly after, as director Pete Docter recently recalled, it was decided that the character should be disgusted rather than disgusting. Kaling admits that Disgust “just says the things I say on a really bad day, the things I really wanna say but then don’t say it!”
Is it really so bad to be sad?
As Lewis Black’s comedic work has no shortage of angry rants on a variety of subjects, including politics, history and religion, he must have seemed an obvious choice to channel the vocal anger into Anger. Less straightforward was the decision to cast Phyllis Smith for Sadness, which only happened after producer Jonas Rivera spotted her in a comically depressive role in Cameron Diaz movie Bad Teacher. Smith has told The Daily Beast that “I have always been more of a joyous person than a sad person”, but that her understanding parents meant that she “didn’t have to hide an emotion”. What a benefit for Inside Out.