Phyllis Smith’s doleful delivery gives Sadness life in 11-year-old’s head

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This article was published 18/06/2015 (4090 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Of the thousands of Hollywood actors out there, the movie Inside Out had to cast just five to play the central emotions of its 11-year-old heroine Riley.

Amy Poehler gives jubilant voice to Joy. Mindy Kaling is the calculating Disgust. Bill Hader is the jittery Fear.

Of all the inhabitants of Riley’s brain, the most no-brainer choice for Anger is that perpetually apoplectic comedian Lewis Black.

Choosing Sadness may have been the most daunting challenge. For one thing, it’s a big role. In the movie, Riley has to move from her happy home in Minneapolis to the more alien environs of San Francisco. In Riley’s head, that translates to Sadness essentially taking the controls from Joy at the steering wheel of Riley’s psyche.

It is delightful that the role would go to Phyllis Smith, the soft-spoken 63-year-old actress best known as the matronly saleslady Phyllis in the American version of the comedy series The Office.

The Missouri-born Smith was actually working in casting when she got the offer to join Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson in front of the cameras of the hit series (2005-2013). So she is in a position to understand why somebody somewhere heard her voice and said: “That’s our Sadness!”

Smith, on the phone from a press tour in Toronto, says that call came from Inside Out’s executive producer Jonas Rivera. And curiously, it didn’t come about after seeing her in The Office.

“He told me that, one night, he decided to watch Bad Teacher,” Smith says, referring to the raunchy 2011 comedy in which she played a meek doormat of a schoolteacher opposite Cameron Diaz’s aggressive maneater.

Rivera detected notes of both timidity and uncertainty in Smith’s voice that lent itself to the movie’s comically melancholy embodiment of Sadness.

“It was the timbre of my voice and my quirkiness,” Smith says. “The things that I always considered negative turned out to positives.”

Inside Out represented Smith’s first ever voice work in an animated film, but since Pixar videotapes the performances of its voice stars, you can see hints of Smith’s physical performance as well.

“If you look at the character of Sadness, they really nailed my eyebrows,” she says. “When I frown, my eyebrows look exactly like Sadness and I wasn’t aware of that until this movie.”

Voice actors generally work alone in a booth when they’re reading the script. For much of her time on the film, Smith was no exception.

“When you’re by yourself, you’re really concentrating on giving them the lines and giving then different choices in a very short amount of time,” she says.

But since some of the film’s more pivotal scenes are between Joy and Sadness, Smith got to work with Poehler, too.

“Pixar, being as smart as they are, made sure our schedules could work out so that the two of us could do the heavy, meaty scenes together and we could work off each other,” she says.

“When Amy and I were together, it was easier to look across the room and have an expression that you could react to,” she says. “And we had a good time riffing and ad-libbing.”

The film qualifies as a solid summer animated feature, but for a cartoon, it also has a surprising degree of sophistication when it comes to portraying complex physiological processes in a family-friendly way. Smith says she is somewhat awed by it, especially when compared to the animated films of her youth.

“I grew up when Disney was doing movies like Cinderella and all the girls were princesses,” she says. “They weren’t real in the way Riley is, an 11-year-old child who is encountering the things that a girl might deal with today.

“I enjoyed those movies and loved them, but I don’t think they have the levels that this has,” she says.

“Hopefully, Inside Out will have the longevity that those older movies have and many years down the line, people will be able to watch it and find some kinship with it.”

Inside Out opens Friday, June 19, at Grant Park, Kildonan Place, McGillivray, Polo Park, St. Vital, and Towne cinemas.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca