How Each of the Main INSIDE OUT Actors Were Cast as Emotions

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the press junket for Pixar's Inside Out, which I'm happy to say is a fantastic return to form for the studio after a couple of relative misfires in recent years. This movie is one of the studio's best, and I'll have a full review coming before the movie arrives in theaters next week.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you one of the coolest aspects of the press junket, which was hearing director Pete Docter and producer Jonas Rivera (the same team behind Monsters, Inc. and Up) talk about how they cast each of the main characters in the film. Amy Poehler plays Joy, Lewis Black plays Anger, Phyllis Smith plays Sadness, Bill Hader plays Fear, and Mindy Kaling plays Disgust, and they're all brilliantly cast in their respective roles. So how did Docter and his team secure the perfect voices for his characters?

Lewis Black

Docter: A lot of the lines on paper, if you read the script, it’s like, ‘Well, that’s sort of funny.’ But when these particular actors bring them to life, it’s somehow so specific and so wonderful, it’s fantastic. Lewis Black was one that even as I was pitching the concept, I would say, ‘Imagine the fun we’re going to have when it comes to casting. We could get people like Lewis Black as anger!’ and people would go, ‘Oh, yeah!’ So when we cast him, Jonas called him.

Rivera: Yeah, I called Lewis through our casting department at Pixar and we pitched him the movie, we wanted him to play Anger. And immediately, he was like, [sarcastic voice] ‘Great. Real stretch casting, guys. Brilliant.’ He mocked us for calling him. He was so great.

Bill Hader

Rivera: Bill came on pretty early. I was just a fan of Bill Hader from Saturday Night Live, and it turns out Bill was a fan of Pixar and we didn’t know it. He shows up one day at Pixar and our casting director calls and says, ‘Bill Hader’s in the atrium. Does anyone want to go have coffee with him?’ [And I said] ‘What?!’ So we go down there, and there’s Bill Hader drinking coffee by himself, and he, on his own dime, had flown up because he loves animation, and he loves it. Bill knows more about movies than anyone I’ve ever known, animated or otherwise, not only at Pixar. We introduce ourselves to him, and he goes, ‘Oh my God, is that Ralph Eggleston?’ Our production designer that no one would know unless you watched side 3 of the Wall*E Blu-ray, and he’d watched everything and knew everybody. We just fell in love with him. He came on to write with us, actually, because he’s a great writer. He was so much fun in the story room and we just went through the script and he started developing voices and leaning towards Fear and he was perfect at it. He really brought this sort of Don Knotts, sheriff of Mulberry, turn-on-a-dime [element] that made us laugh.

Mindy Kaling

Docter: Disgust we struggled with a lot, because we weren’t sure whether she should be disgusting or disgusted. Once we arrived at disgusted, Mindy’s voice came up. And again, she takes lines that are fine writing and makes them amazing to listen to. And she, like most of the cast, we would come with the script and I would say, ‘Do you have any other ideas for this? Go ahead and play around.’ She would come up with little alternate lines and aside and added a ton to both the character and the film.

Phyllis Smith

Docter: Sadness was one that early on, we actually had that character as male in the very first versions. And then as the film went on, we realized, ‘We have too many guys in this movie, especially if it’s supposed to take place in a girl’s head.’ And I think that was about the same time you found…

Rivera: I saw [Phyllis] in the movie Bad Teacher. You had written her more like a crybaby, which was funny, but in Bad Teacher she was hesitant and couldn’t even order a chicken sandwich without saying, “I’ll have the chicken sandwich?” Everything had a question mark. That felt right, and it worked, and that’s how we ended up playing the character. And she just nailed it.

Amy Poehler

Docter: Joy was the last one to be cast and the most difficult of any of the characters to write for, because she had a tendency of being really annoying. If you write someone who’s always really chipper and upbeat, and is like, ‘Come on guys, we can do this!’ it just got to be like, ‘Ugh, I want to sock that person.’ And so Amy was able to put that in some way that made it entertaining, it was not insufferable, you root for her. I think there were a couple other small writing clues that helped break that open a little bit.

I don’t remember whose idea this was, but instead of recording right away, we spent the whole day reading through the script one sequence at a time. Amy would start narrowing in on certain lines, not just for her, but for some of the other characters as well. She’s got such a brilliant writing mind as well as being a great performer, so we took advantage of that.

Inside Out arrives in theaters on June 19th.