For Amy Poehler, starring in the Inside Out movies has been a life-changing experience.
While attending the 12th Annual Bring Change to Mind Revels & Revelations gala, the actress, who voices the character Joy in both the 2015 original animated film and the 2024 sequel, tells PEOPLE exclusively that the role has sparked meaningful discussions — as well as personal reflections — about how we navigate our emotions.
“My experience in Inside Out and Inside Out 2 has truly, fundamentally changed my life,” says Poehler, 53. “Playing a character like Joy, having big conversations about what our emotions do to us and how they live in us and how we’re supposed to experience them.”
“That and watching how different the past decade has been in terms of not only the resources we need, the conversations we need to have, but who we need to have them with. Tonight is filled with young people, and I think we have a lot to learn from them,” she added, referring to the org’s mission to end the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Back in June, Poehler told PEOPLE how she personally related to Riley, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Inside Out 2, who finds herself facing the confusing mix of emotions that comes with puberty. Joy and the team’s newest member, Anxiety, compete for dominance in Riley’s brain, a push-pull dynamic Poehler says she herself felt at 13.
“I definitely was a mix of anxiety and joy for sure, wrapped up in a Boston accent,” she recalled, joking, “And [I had] lots of shoulder pads and funky earrings.”
“I guess I felt a lot of what Riley felt, in that your head is full, very noisy,” she continued. “You go from just being — hopefully, if you have a childhood that provides you with safety — you go from being not very self-conscious to suddenly really caring about what other people think really fast.”
Now that she’s parenting two teenagers — she and ex-husband Will Arnett share sons Archie, 16, and Abel, 14 — the Sisters star said she is seeing the challenging, coming-of-age experience through their eyes.
“I think that’s kind of why I related to playing Joy so much. In the film, Joy has to let go, and when you’re raising a kid, they’re their own person. You just can’t protect them from pain and you’re really not even supposed to,” she noted. “You’re supposed to let them kind of have all their feelings so that they can figure out who they are.”
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The Saturday Night Live alum also opened up to PEOPLE in April about how stepping into the voiceover booth to record Joy’s lines sometimes led to intense personal epiphanies as she tackled the emotional material.
“It’s so deep,” she explained at the time. “Because it’s like talking to your inner child, talking to you as a parent, talking to you as yourself, talking to the future version of you.”
“You have to really go there,” she said, but added: “It’s really satisfying to do it.”
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