Yes, she cried in the audition. “There’s something about this story and these characters that I think really brings fundamental truths about our experience to the surface,” she explains. “It’s so relatable, so emotional, so pure, that whether you want to or not, you use what you have and what you’ve been through.” By the end of the audition, she was begging to get to play the part. “It was an extremely desperate thing to do, but I think what people are looking for in audition rooms is passion. That it means something to them personally, and they’ll put pieces of themselves into it,” Hawke says.
Right from the first time she laid eyes on the character design for Anxiety, Hawke felt an affinity for her. “She was pitched to me with a picture of her,” she recalls, “and I was like, ‘YES, that’s ME! That’s the Velma Dinkley [of Scooby-Doo fame] part I’ve always dreamed of, with the orange and the skirt and stripes and the teeth!” Zoinks.
Read Empire’s full Maya Hawke interview – on playing Anxiety in Inside Out 2 – in The Acolyte issue, on sale Thursday 11 April. Order a copy online here. Inside Out 2 hits UK cinemas on 14 June.