Amy Poehler, ‘Inside Out 2’ Cast Share What They Loved About Being 13

Riley is back and with a whole new set of emotions in the highly anticipated sequel Inside Out 2.

Directed by Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen, the animated film follows a now 13-year-old Riley who must grapple with a new set of overbearing emotions while staying at a sleepaway hockey camp — with the most controlling emotion of all being Anxiety.

HipHollywood sat down with the cast including Amy Poehler who returns to voice Joy to find out what they LOVED about their 13-year-old self.

Amy Poehler (Joy)
I loved the feeling, when you’re 13, 14, you start getting a little bit of independence. You walk to the store with your friends. You’re not a little kid anymore. And I remember really loving that feeling, loving just getting my parents trusting me a little bit more, having a little bit more responsibility. I think I had a job, my first job. I grew up in the ’80s, so we were working early. So that feeling.

Maya Hawke (Anxiety)
I think where I really found myself worth, weirdly in that period of time was in my relationship to nature. I was always a city a kid, but I spent all this time in upstate New York. And I really love that I was a kid that knew the names of different trees and knew how to clean out a beehive with honey and knew how you make maple syrup. For some reason, that really grounded me in a sense of self-worth and practicality that I wasn’t getting from a lot of other places at that moment. And so that was something I loved about myself.

Tony Hale (Fear)
What I love, there’s a lot, that was tough, but I looked back at the time, maybe because I didn’t have social media like they do now, but I was just in my world. It was like, I want to get the part in that play. I was just [in the moment] not somewhere else so much.

Liza Lapira (Disgust)
I loved my resilience. We talked a lot about there’s a shutdown that can happen, doesn’t always happen, but especially for girls. I liked that there was a little bit of that shutdown, but I picked myself up every day and I was resilient. Then I got to a point where I thought, You know what? I don’t need to fit in with them. I can do it on my own. There was an independence there.

Lewis Black (Anger)
I didn’t really love it, but I was impressed with the fact that while I was studying for my bar mitzvah, which was the end of my relationship with my religion, that I had a 50,000-word vocabulary in Hebrew that had no place to go. Zip, imagine. I’m sitting here going… And it was like I knew the end was near because once you’re, it’s not going to happen. Where am I going to go? I’m going to walk down to my high school and start that. No. So it always amazed me. And that was the last really. And I should have learned another real language at that point. But not Mr. Stupid.

Paul Walker Hauser (Embarrassment)
When I was 13, I wanted to be Rob Reiner. I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. I wanted to go to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. It was all just belief and one track mindedness all of a sudden. But I do stuff like that now, so that’s cool. I’m proud of that kid for believing in himself when he had very little to go off of.

Inside Out 2 is in theaters June 14.