How Kendall Coyne Schofield became a voice in Pixar’s ‘Inside Out 2’

Kendall Coyne Schofield was at home in Chicago, pregnant with her first child, when she got the call.

It was February 2023 and filmmakers at Pixar had been working on a sequel to the wildly successful, Oscar-winning animated film “Inside Out.” They wanted to know if Coyne Schofield would be interested in a cameo.

“I couldn’t say yes fast enough,” Coyne Schofield told The Athletic in April after her participation in the movie was announced. “It was definitely a pinch-me moment.”

Over a year later — and nine years after the original film was released — “Inside Out 2” will be in theaters on Friday with a major Hollywood cast including Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, and Ayo Edebiri. The movie returns to the mind of Riley — now a teenager — as she wrestles with new emotions while preparing for high school. The majority of the movie takes place at a hockey camp, producer Mark Nielsen told The Athletic, and Coyne Schofield will be voicing a hockey announcer in some of the many moments where the sport is at the forefront.

“The first film pales in comparison in its hockey representation to this one,” said Nielsen, who won an Oscar for his work on “Toy Story 4.” “It’s really a core part of the story and what Riley is going through.”

The fact that the sport plays such a large part in one of the summer’s most anticipated movies comes at a pivotal time for women’s hockey. The Professional Women’s Hockey League officially launched on Jan. 1, and just completed its inaugural season, with Coyne Schofield’s Minnesota team winning the first-ever championship. “Inside Out 2” will showcase girls hockey on an incredibly large stage with this weekend’s international release.

“It’s so important, as we’ve talked about with the PWHL, for a young boy and a young girl to grow up with the same dream to be a professional hockey player,” said Coyne Schofield. “And for Disney and Pixar to have this movie and the main character is a hockey player and happens to be a girl, (is incredible).”

Hockey plays a central role in “Inside Out 2,” but that wasn’t always the plan. The first version of the screenplay had Riley stepping away from the sport, Nielsen said. The story still focused on new emotions as Riley transitioned from middle school to high school, but it was told outside the context of youth hockey. By the second test screening — there were eight in the process of writing the film — the filmmakers decided that Riley should once again be a hockey player, Nielsen said.

“Her love of hockey was so beautifully captured in the first film,” Nielsen said. “We wanted to get back to that.”

In the original “Inside Out,” Riley was introduced as an 11-year-old hockey player from Minnesota who moves to San Francisco with her family and struggles with the transition away from her friends and teammates. The director, Pete Docter, is from Bloomington, Minn. And while he did not play hockey growing up — Nielsen joked that it’s “a point of shame” for Docter — he wanted to be true to the region and have Riley play the sport of choice for many kids in Minnesota. Over 15,000 girls and women played hockey in Minnesota in 2022-23, according to USA Hockey, more than any other district in the United States.

Hockey was an easy — and accurate — choice.

Nielsen said the crew also liked differentiating Riley from other teenage Pixar characters and giving young female hockey players, or just athletes, the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the movie — the way “The Mighty Ducks” did in the ’90s with Connie “The Velvet Hammer” Moreau.

“I would love nothing more than to see a new generation of Rileys get interested in the sport of hockey because of this film and inspire girls out there to know that this amazing sport is for them too,” said Nielsen. “There’s now even a professional women’s hockey league to prove that you can go all the way in this sport.”

The “Inside Out 2” crew spent a significant amount of time researching the sport, leaning on the expertise of the Canadian and U.S. members who played as kids. Nielsen called them the “hockey brain trust” who helped ensure the uniforms, equipment and gameplay were realistic — and that hockey players, coaches and fans could watch the movie and feel like they got it right. One Pixar employee, Tracey Roberts, brought in equipment — like jerseys, pads, sticks, pucks and helmets — which hung on the walls in the movie’s production pod.

“The animation team was constantly coming into the pod and referencing that stuff,” Nielsen said. “A lot of our animators played hockey, too. The ones that are actually physically animating the characters and they helped us be really truthful in how we treated the skating and the drills that we did that we put into this movie.”

At one point, Nielsen went to Roberts — who works in the characters department at Pixar but was not on the crew for “Inside Out 2” — and asked for her opinion on who they could bring in to voice the movie’s hockey announcer. Roberts played hockey growing up and has coached and helped run development camps in the Bay Area. When she was asked, Roberts said she “immediately thought of Kendall.”

Roberts remembered seeing Coyne Schofield become the first woman to compete in the skills competition at the 2019 NHL All-Star weekend — where Coyne Schofield turned heads in the fastest skater competition — and had met her at a girls hockey clinic at the Oakland Ice Center. Coyne Schofield also spent the 2019-20 season as a color commentator for select San Jose Sharks broadcasts.

“She’s a great role model for young girls and (I thought) she’d be fantastic,” Roberts said. “It just added more depth to the movie, more real hockey.”

“We want to have authenticity wherever we can,” Nielsen said. “We thought it would be so cool for hockey fans if even the person they’re hearing off screen calling the game is a voice they can recognize from the sport of hockey.”

While Roberts did not officially work on the movie, Nielsen and Mann decided to name Riley’s hockey coach — Coach Roberts — in the movie after her. “She was like the coach to us on everything we needed to know about hockey,” he said.

Coyne Schofield recorded her lines in April 2023, at a downtown Chicago film studio.

Nielsen, Mann, Roberts and Maurissa Horwitz, the film’s editor, joined Coyne Schofield in studio via video call from the Pixar Studios in Emeryville, Calif. After an introduction and an overview of the movie, Mann coached Coyne Schofield through the script. Sometimes he’d direct her to speak a little faster, or to bring a different energy to the line read. At times, Mann would ask Coyne Schofield’s advice on the more natural way for a hockey player, or commentator, to say something. Over the hour-long recording session, Coyne Schofield did around 15-20 takes on each line.

She said she got the script before heading to the studio and did some practice reading with her husband, NFL offensive lineman Michael Schofield, but largely relied on the guidance of Mann and the crew.

“We just had a blast in that session,” Nielsen said. “She was great and she’s never done anything like that before. But she was very receptive to hearing about the story and very receptive to the direction given by Kelsey.”

After the recording, Coyne Schofield returned home and couldn’t talk about the experience until her involvement in the movie was announced in March.

“I did it so long ago and now that it’s finally here, it is really cool,” she said. “This is obviously a tremendous honor. I’ve been a huge Disney-Pixar fan since I was a little kid, and now that I have my son … I can’t wait to be able to watch this with him.”

Coyne Schofield had her son, Drew, on July 1 and said his name will appear in the “babies born during production” part of the movie credits. In the months since the March announcement, she said she’s heard from many people about their kids wanting to play hockey just like Riley did in the first movie.

“Having a main character in such an iconic movie being a girl playing hockey, makes such a difference,” she said.

“For (female hockey players) to be able to see themselves in this movie and Riley and all the other girls are playing hockey it’s super exciting,” said Roberts. “If they can see people like them in the movie, and they can see people like them in the women’s professional league and see people like Kendall it makes (hockey) feel more accessible to them.”

(Image courtesy of Pixar)