Tony Hale Praises ‘Inside Out 2’ for Giving ‘Compassion’ to All Emotions

Tony Hale may play Fear in Inside Out 2, but the movie is teaching him not to be afraid of his emotions — even the scary ones.

“I get excited because what this film does is make people feel seen,” Hale, 53, exclusively told Us Weekly at the film’s Los Angeles premiere earlier this week. “When I was a kid in middle school, there wasn’t language for anxiety and all this kind of stuff. And just to, kind of, feel seen, but also to have a little more compassion for your emotions — I spent a lot of my life trying to push them away. But it’s like, no, they’re trying to help.”

Hale makes his Inside Out debut in the sequel, taking over Fear from Bill Hader, who voiced the character in the first film. The purple, sweater-sporting feeling is one of Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) core five emotions alongside Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (first Mindy Kaling, now Liza Lapira).

“I’m kind of right now, like, what am I doing here?!,” Hale quipped to Us of joining the start-studded cast. “It hasn’t hit me yet.”

After helping Riley deal with moving to San Francisco in the first film, the sequel sees the core five facing another challenge when new emotions like Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) join the gang as Riley hits puberty.

Hale, for his part, said there isn’t “enough time” in the world to divulge all the middle school horror stories he experienced himself as a preteen and noted that he can relate all too well with Riley’s suffering.

“I was a theater kid growing up in the south where everybody was into sports and I was like, ‘Where’s my people?’” he recalled. “Finally, I found a theater [where] I felt seen, [but puberty] is just living in, like, every emotion.”

Hale isn’t the only cast member who remembered horror stories of their younger days. James Austin Johnson, who plays talking fanny pack Pouchy in the sequel, confessed that he had serious bathroom problems as a freshman in a new school.

“My first year in high school — seriously, like, the first — I don’t think I pooped for the first month,” he told Us. “I was so tense being in, like, a new school with new kids that I don’t even remember being able to poop. I don’t know if that makes any sense. But that’s what happened to me.”

Lilimar Hernandez, who plays cool, older high school hockey player Val, revealed that she started feeling more complex emotions in her own life when she moved to Los Angeles and booked her first TV show on Nickelodeon.

“I think there was a lot of anxiety and embarrassment and fear [during my first show],” she said, “and I think putting the label of ‘role model’ especially at such a young age for other kids that were my age or younger.”

Despite the ups and downs, the actress said she wouldn’t take back her “crazy adolescence” for anything.

“Even though I think I definitely felt all of the emotions, that time taught me so much, and I’m glad that I gave myself the space to feel all of that and not shame myself,” she explained.

Hernandez believes that films like Inside Out 2 will help people — both young and old — find the positives in their ever-changing emotions like she has.

“We’re gonna bring everybody [in] across the board age wise who needs to hear that emotions aren’t a villainous thing,” she said. “That we don’t need to suppress them that we don’t need to pretend that they’re not there, and that it is a fallacy to say that we can suppress them to the point of them no longer existing, or that we don’t need them. We need all of them.”

She continued, “We’re always going to have all of them at every stage in our life. And I think the best thing [to] get out of this movie is to humanize them and to make them endearing. So that you know to embrace your emotions throughout your life.”