Amy Poehler Pushed for Inside Out 2: ‘When Are You Going to Make Another One?’ (Exclusive)

As Inside Out 2 continues to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars — it recently overtook Dune: Part Two at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing North American release of 2024 — Amy Poehler can happily take some credit.

The Saturday Night Live alum, 52, who voiced the role of Joy in the original 2015 animated comedy and reprised the part in the sequel, tells PEOPLE she had been asking for years to get another one made.

“I've been bugging Pete Docter [the Chief Creative Officer of studio Pixar] and the team and just saying, ‘When are you guys going to make another one? When's that happening?’” says Poehler.

“When they told me their idea of how to approach the second one, I thought it was just genius,” she adds.

Moviegoers apparently agree, as Inside Out 2 has become the first genuine blockbuster of the 2024 summer season.

In the follow-up to the 2015 Pixar hit about the animated emotions inside a young girl, years have passed and Riley (Kensington Tallman) is now going through puberty as she gets ready to enter high school. 

Complicated new feelings like Anxiety (Maya Hawke) and Envy (Ayo Edebiri) join existing emotions including Joy (Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) and Anger (Lewis Black). 

While Anxiety and Joy battle for dominance inside Riley, the young girl tries to figure out who she really is as she chooses between old friends and new ones, snaps at her parents and pushes boundaries she never explored before.

Poehler says the movie explores questions like, “What kind of friend do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you care about?”

“I think that is a completely universal experience,” she says.

As for what Poehler was like when she was a teenager? “I definitely was a mix of anxiety and joy for sure, wrapped up in a Boston accent,” jokes the Massachusetts native. “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 adds. “You go from being not very self-conscious to suddenly really caring about what other people think really fast.”

Inside Out 2 is in theaters now.