Maya Hawke used her personal experience of having a panic attack when filming 'Inside Out 2'.
Maya Hawke used her own experiences of mental health struggles to portray an anxiety attack in Inside Out 2
The Pixar movie focuses gives life to the emotions inside the mind of a young girl called Riley and 'Stranger Things' star Maya joined the cast of the sequel playing anxiety opposite Amy Poehler as Joy, Tony Hale as Fear and Lewis Black as Anger - and one of the pivotal moments of the movie comes when Riley suffers her first panic attack.
Maya admits she brought her own experience of anxiety issues to the scene, telling Variety: "As a person who has had an anxiety attack [I brought that experience] ... Your breath moves to a different place and you can’t breathe as deeply as you want to.
"I saw it as the air not going down into her breath. It was like a tornado, and you can’t breathe when you’re stuck in the middle of a tornado."
The film's department heads took part in around 25 meetings to make sure they got the scene right because they were so keen to portray it accurately, with director Kelsey Mann explaining: "You want to make sure that it feels real and authentic.
"To come up with a look that achieves that is really hard. It took lots of different departments all working collaboratively in order to pull that off. We also did it right at the end. Time was running out."
Amy Poehler - who voices Joy - is mum to two teenage boys and she also admitted the scene was tough to play out. She said: "That’s a hard thing, when you’re a parent and you don’t know what to do when you’re trying to help your child.
"If Riley is Joy’s kid, then Joy is kind of like ‘What’s happened to my kid?' Pixar is so smart to have Joy take her foot off the gas, and by doing so, and not pushing so hard, Riley just soothes herself, which is the hard lesson of growing up."
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