Pixar’s Inside Out left a twofold legacy in the animation world. Some people think of it as a poignant movie about the necessity of sadness that turned abstract psychological theories into whimsical set-pieces and a resonant storyline. But a certain subsection of the internet decided that Riley’s dad (voiced by Kyle MacLachlan) is actually a hot daddy.
The 2017 Buzzfeed piece “It’s Finally Time We Talked About The Hot Dad From ‘Inside Out’” (subtitled “A Pixar DILF”) ignited this conversation, which has… never really stopped since. There are tweets, fan edits, and thirst trap posts galore. (Warning: That last one’s as NSFW as you can get with a fully clothed person.) Every so often, people rediscover how much they lust after the dad from Inside Out. (Sidebar: His first name is Bill, in case you were wondering.)
With a new Inside Out movie on the way, now is the perfect time to remember this particular internet crush, and ponder whether he’ll sway some new hearts in Inside Out 2. On a recent press trip to Pixar, I had the chance to tell production designer Jason Deamer about the internet’s fervor for Riley’s hot dad.
“Well, we cannot let them down,” he laughed.
Image: Disney/Pixar
As it happens, Riley’s dad gave the team the most trouble among the human characters when they were translating assets from the original 2015 movie into the newest version of Pixar’s animation system. It’s been almost 10 years since the first movie, which means nearly a decade of software updates, so reusing the same assets wasn’t an option, and the filmmakers had to start from scratch. The character designers were able to recreate Riley and her mom with no problem, but the 2024 version of Bill Andersen was missing a certain je ne sais quoi.
“He was weirdly hard to do,” Deamer says. “We have his actual face geometry… and it didn’t look like him! All we ended up doing was taking his eyes and doing that [makes a gesture indicating furrowing the character’s brows and pushing them forward a little more]. I swear to God. And then it was like, Oh, there he is!”
The new Inside Out movie takes place a few years after the first one, as Riley turns 13 and experiences the full emotional whirlwind of being a teenager. New emotions, including Anxiety (Maya Hawke) and Envy (Ayo Edebiri) take over Riley’s emotional headquarters, sending Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), and the others into a tailspin. And because puberty waits for no one, this all happens when Riley attends a prestigious hockey camp that might make or break her next four years of high school — or so Anxiety would have her think.
Since Riley’s hot dad is not, in fact, the main character of Inside Out, we probably won’t see a lot of him in the new movie. But the good news is that what we do see of him will be accurate to his original internet-declared hotness, just taken up to a new level of high definition.
Riley’s hot dad, as well as Joy, Sadness, and the other characters, will return to theaters in Inside Out 2 on June 14. We’ll have more from our Pixar “set visit” as we get closer to release.