Britain is ruled by three emotions, says Amy Poehler: “Sadness, anger, fear.” Plus some disgust, too. She’s kidding! She’s also not kidding. But we can take it, right?
“Frankly, I think the UK is excellent at gentle teasing that I really love,” she says. “It feels very familiar. You have to give it to each other in a good way. That’s how you respect each other. You don’t poke fun at people you don’t think can take it.”
A respectful pause to remember some of those Poehler and Tina Fey gave it to when they hosted the Golden Globes. Quentin Tarantino (“The star of all my sexual nightmares”). George Clooney (“Gravity is the story of how he would rather float off into space and die than spend another minute with a woman his own age”). This introduction of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow: ”When it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.”
So, buckle up, Brits: Poehler is in town at the tail-end of a socio-anthropological world tour whose official remit is promoting Inside Out 2, the sequel to Pixar’s 2015 tale of personified emotions (Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust) who bicker within the brain of 11-year-old Riley. Poehler voices Joy – which, she reckons, is the predominant feeling in Australia, from where she has just flown.
In the US, though, “fear is definitely up there. And anger, and sadness”. Is that why Trump is successful? She shrugs politely. Because of his confidence? She beams, lips welded: a shutdown so categoric and courteous it makes you giggle.
Poehler does this. An all-American sweetheart readily embraced by the international market, she mixes wit, warmth and candour in exact calibration. Add to that killer delivery and stone cold reaction shots honed by years on Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation. She is kind, friendly and dignified.
Back in the early 2010s, Pixar had been struggling to find anyone who could voice Joy – so remorselessly upbeat and resourceful – without driving audiences to distraction. A decade on, Poehler is irreplaceable, unlike some other members of the first film’s voice cast, who declined to return due to low pay offers.
Her $5m salary, by contrast, includes some creative consultation, as well as much winning and polished advocacy (sample: “Pixar are really good at smushing together entertainment and big ideas. It’s not easy. You can write something important. And you can write something entertaining. It’s hard to do both”). It’s doing the trick: the film is on track to make $90m this weekend, the biggest box office opening of the year so far.
After London, she will head home, swerving Paris, as someone else voices Joy in the French version. But she is curious to know what they make of Ennui, one of the new emotions which – alongside Anxiety, Embarrassment and Envy – invade Riley’s inner life as she hits puberty. Ennui is languid, vaguely grey and voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos. “Are they gonna like her or not?” Poehler asks wryly. She adopts a bof! French accent: “‘This is bullshit!’ Or: ‘Yes, that’s us. You all do too much. Take a nap.’” A great, big, un-European cackle.
Inside Out 2, I am happy to report, features an ennui/wee-wee joke guaranteed to become a key cultural touchstone for my seven-year-old, but by and large it’s for a slightly older audience than the original. If that film helped children regulate competing feelings, this throws teenagers a life raft in the hormone storm. Even more, it acts as a map for their beleaguered carers.
“That’s what a parent is,” says Poehler. “You just want to weirdly crawl in your kid’s head.” She has two sons, Archie, 15, and Abel, 13, with ex-husband Will Arnett. “You’re always like: what’s going on in there? And of course, it’s usually at the time when they have bouncers outside of their door.”
Small wonder if the interior is a tip; it’s been a messy decade. “And I don’t think we – meaning myself and people my age and above – really understand how isolating it’s been for young people. I really don’t think we do.”
The pandemic, political unrest, climate crisis: “Anxiety feels like a word that’s been felt a lot. You don’t have to teach people what that means any more.” Gen Z fans of the first film have said to her of its fretful sequel: ‘“This is exactly what I wanted to see.”’ Poehler pulls a face. “Which is like: ‘Oh no!’ But also: cool!”
Six years ago, Poehler took part in a Q&A for a Hollywood Reporter comedy special – and slapped down every generic question. Her most memorable heckler? “Who cares? The whole world is on fire.” Dream product endorsement? “A giant whale just died in Thailand after eating 80 plastic bags.” Guilty pleasure? “Let’s not forget over 4,600 people have died in Puerto Rico.”
“Yeah, I was in a mood,” she says, grinning. But is that the reason young people feel gaslit? Everyone pretends their future isn’t in flames? She nods: “Young people are dismissed, often very marginalised and feel really out of control of their lives. It feels like the world is on their shoulders, but we also treat them like they’re silly and foolish, and the stuff that they like is silly and foolish. So: are we asking them to fix everything or are we making fun of them for not being equipped to do so, for not having fought a war? What are we doing to them?
“If I was them, I’d be like: what do you want from me? You want me to save all of you from all the fucked-up stuff you guys have done, but you’re also completely infantilising me.”
Poehler is now 52. Her new tactic, she says, is to take her cues from those younger and wiser. “The way that that generation is curious about their own identity is really powerful,” she says, with vim. “Don’t stop investigating yourself! The trap we all fall into is thinking we’re cooked. It’s not like you turn a certain age and you say: ‘There! I’ve got it. I know who I am!’ It never ends. Parenting doesn’t end, being a person in the world doesn’t end, being a woman in the world.
“Certainty is dangerous. So I’m very inspired by how young people continually poke at the stuff I thought were core beliefs. And if it’s tender and it hurts, it usually means you should ask: why do I feel so defensive about it?”
Such as? “Capitalism. One I’ve been really trying to unpack for myself is the productivity myth; this idea of the hustle. Hard work was a sign for me of a lot of self-esteem. And thinking hard work was the reason one got x, y and z, when in fact there’s a lot of systems in place.”
Anything else? “Fluidity in general, be it political or gender or philosophical ideas about floating between two positions at once. The binary is a thing young people have dragged us into learning about. And now I’m seeing it everywhere! When we were growing up, the either/or of life felt almost liberating, like safety. I mean, some of it holds up. Some of it is just what it is. But mostly, I now think it’s too blunt or too basic a cut.”
Where that could get sticky is in considering how Inside Out 2 might be different were Riley a boy. “I don’t want to be binary in my thinking,” she says, alive to the fix. “And it is an interesting question to figure out what societal pressures feel specific to young boys and young girls. And whether that’s even true any more? What does the updated real-life version of that look like now?”
But, yes, she will concede some aspects seem pretty girly. She likes that the film “investigates the complex and natural resource that is female friendships – which have been huge and important in my life and remain so. The energy of them. A lot of the emotions are genderless, but there is something very specific about that.”
She liked that it looks at what “ambition and competition” mean to young women (Riley is a hockey nut). And that they’re “still kind of goofballs. They want to hang on to that dance-like-no-one’s-watching feeling. It does go away pretty fast. And once it’s gone, it’s 40 years until it comes back, when really no one’s watching.” Another grand cackle.
Poehler was born to two teachers in a happy, stable middle-class household outside Boston in 1971. She dabbled in drama at school, thrilled by an off-script laugh as Dorothy in a fourth grade Wizard of Oz. After college, she did a decade of increasingly successful improv comedy, during which she met Fey, Arnett and most of the men and women still dominating US entertainment. She and Fey joined SNL as performers just after 9/11, alongside Seth Meyers and Maya Rudolph. All are still close.
This start, she says, dramatically changed her emotional landscape. “You had to lean in. You were failing or succeeding with someone. So there were some stakes as to how you had to listen. That helps.” With parenthood, too: “It takes active learning and listening constantly because it just keeps changing. The minute you think you’ve figured out the story, it moves on you. And it keeps happening over and over again. It’s been the most satisfying thing in my life to figure out how to parent well.”
Once her sons were in school, and Parks and Rec stopped, Poehler moved more into movies: Baby Mama and Sisters with Fey, plus three as a director –Moxie (about a teen girl who starts a revolutionary zine), Wine Country (basically a boozy SNL ladies’ reunion), and Lucy and Desi (a documentary about Lucille Ball).
What’s next? Nothing, apparently. There must be projects, but her IMDb dance card is curiously unmarked (A-listers usually have 15 or so titles in pre-production). Yet the longer you spend with Poehler, the more she warms up and goes – her word – esoteric, the less certain of herself she seems. When she says things like, “Do I still believe the stuff I used to believe in my 20s? Why do I think that? Who am I? What do I want to care about? How do I keep staying engaged and caring?”, it feels non-rhetorical.
Perhaps it’s just her age. “You start thinking about your next act. The end of the second act of any film is where it’s like: ‘Oh no, what are we gonna do?’ So maybe you’re just like: ‘Everything has gone crazy!’ I don’t know.”
Poehler’s early career was marked by brio and self-belief. At a Cannes press conference years back, she was told she must be surprised to be there: did she ever expect such a thing? “Sure I did,” she said, dead serious.
In her memoir, Yes Please, she writes that people often ask if she always knew she was going to be on SNL: “I think the simple answer is: yes.” Her book is fun, boosterish, chaotic – but the most revealing passage about Poehler comes not from that but from Fey’s memoir. In Bossypants, Fey recalls the time Poehler, then quite new to SNL, made a “vulgar” joke in the writers’ room.
“Jimmy Fallon turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, ‘Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.’ Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’ […] A cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute.”
Old days Poehler was pure no-fucks-given. So is she now acquiring them? “I guess. I don’t know.” She pauses, sips from a glass of water perched stressfully on the sofa beside her. “There’s that idea we’re all walking on the side of a cliff, and we just don’t know it. When are you the most brave? What youth can give you is you don’t really know that you’re walking on the side of a cliff. When you get older you kind of do.”
It was healthy to work in the “comedy emergency room” of SNL, she says. Time pressure prevented you getting trapped in your own head. Nowadays, “I have to fight against feeling like everything is important. To whom? Nothing is important! As you get older you get that feeling of right-sizing things.”
The dangers of introspection are not, it has to be said, best avoided by being paid to bang on about yourself in aid of a film that encourages self-examination. “The incredible focus on the self can be super-illuminating and very limiting in terms of how to relate,” she says. “Introspection can be inaction. You can get a little stuck. I know I’ve done it. You get a little snake eating its own tail.”
And the world tour is helping: a chance to observe how others operate. “Maybe it’s an American thing. We really do love to talk about ourselves, to be experts on ourselves. We love to get in there deep and settle in nice and cosy.
“Maybe we have something to learn from the Brits who are standing outside in the cold, having a cuppa, telling us to get up out of ourselves.”
Here comes the cackle; another survival technique. “Honestly, laughing has been very helpful for me. I know that sounds very basic, but we forget we can have a sense of humour about ourselves. We forget to laugh. We can take life and ourselves very, very seriously.” Just tell that to James Cameron.