By George & Josh Bate
Few franchises, if any, have defined multiple generations as profoundly as Toy Story. Pixar Animation Studios’ film franchise, celebrating its 31st anniversary this year with the release of another highly anticipated installment, continues to captivate audiences of all ages with stories brimming with heart and humor and characters that have become enduring fixtures of pop culture. In Toy Story 5, Pixar once again crafts a film that couples crowd-pleasing entertainment with a warmth and emotional resonance most movies can only aspire to reach. This time around though, the toys face off against a threat more formidable than any they’ve faced before – tech.
Toy Story 5 picks up after Woody (Tom Hanks) left Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) to stay with Bo Peep (Annie Potts) and help abandoned toys find their owners at the end of Toy Story 4. In the meantime, Jessie (Joan Cusack) has become the head toy of Bonnie’s room, while Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) serves as her right-hand man, or toy. But when Bonnie grows attached to a frog-like tablet named Lilypad (Greta Lee), the toys bring Woody back into the fold as they put up a fight to stay relevant in the face of a technology that threatens to take Bonnie’s attention away from them.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Toy Story 5 actor Tony Hale, who voices Forky in the movie, about the newest Pixar adventure, its timely subject matter, Forky’s journey in the new film, insights into the recording process at Pixar, and more.
In the 31 years since the original Toy Story hit theaters, the world has changed quite a bit. Children now have access to technology at their fingertips that was previously inconceivable when Woody and Buzz first met back in 1995. The children the toys once cared for and were played by are now grown up, while the toys themselves don’t age and largely remain the same. It’s at this intersection of growing up, fearing abandonment, and finding meaning in a quickly changing world that Toy Story 5 arrives upon a truly clever premise – toys versus tech.
Rather than reductively lamenting to the audience about the all-evil nature of technology, director and co-writer Andrew Stanton avoids preaching to the audience about the increasingly prevalent role of technology, while still taking a stance on its impact on younger generations. “Pixar’s not bashing technology,” explained Hale. “It’s here to stay. It’s not going away. But they’re just saying that nothing’s going to replace human connection. Nothing. I think technology tries to replace it, but it’s not. True, powerful human connection, nothing can match that. And, as long as we keep that balance, we keep that play.”
The emergence of Lilypad in Bonnie’s life disrupts all of her toys, including Forky. When introduced in 2019’s Toy Story 4, Forky immediately became a fan-favorite breakout character. The handcrafted toy made by Bonnie during her first day of kindergarten brought something decidedly different to the franchise. Bewildered by his own sentience and sporadically in the middle of existential crisis, Forky proved weirdly relatable.
“Ugh, I love Forky so much,” Hale joyfully stated. “He’s so open and curious. I mean, a classic example is during [Toy Story] 4, when there’s that Gabby Gabby, the evil antique doll, you know? And everybody was like, ‘She’s evil, she’s evil, she’s evil.’ Forky was like, ‘I think she’s got pretty hair.’ And so he goes over and just starts brushing her hair and, because of that connection, because [he] crossed over into whatever everybody else was calling evil, you saw this redemption in Gabby, and that she found somebody to love her and found a child. He just has this childlike curiosity with no labels and stuff that I think is just such a role model, you know? For me at least. I love him.”
When we last saw Forky on the big screen, he had a love-at-first-sight moment with Karen Beverly, another sentient craft-toy made by Bonnie. Now, in Toy Story 5, Forky and Karen Beverly are taking their relationship to the next step. “This is another thing I love about Forky,” Hale described. “He’s blunt. He keeps it real. He’s like, ‘Listen, I love her, but this is gonna be hard.’ And it’s just like, ‘Yeah, relationships are tough.’ It’s a lot of work, but it is pretty also. Like, he works fast. The guy comes into the world [in] Toy Story 4 and he’s already met somebody at the end of the movie. And then now he’s getting married. And I think the only other married people are Potato Heads. He’s definitely curious. He’s just like, ‘I found somebody. Now I have a lot questions.’”
Hale pinpointed one of his favorite Forky moments in Toy Story 5 as a quintessential example of his bluntness. “Another line that I love [in Toy Story 5] is when the lizard.. I guess they realized that it wasn’t the same lizard [after it died] and then Forky’s like, ‘Okay, Lizard Number One died. This is the second lizard,’” Hale said. “And he doesn’t do it [with] shame. He just wants to let the facts be known.”
Viewers would never know it, such is Hale’s seemingly effortless vocal work to bring Forky to life, but the renowned comedic and dramatic actor was initially anxious entering the vast world of Toy Story. “I was very nervous coming into Toy Story 4,” Hale recounted. “It wasn’t until I heard my voice in the trailer for the movie that I thought, ‘Okay, they didn’t replace me.’ I was convinced they were going to replace me. So, I was definitely overwhelmed. I had such a great time but was overwhelmed. This time, it was a lot more fun, because Forky’s been established and it was just playtime.”
Now that some of the anxiety subsided, Hale is truly embracing the joy that comes from being a member of the Toy Story family. “If I’m honest, this Toy Story is when I think it finally began to hit me that I was even in Toy Story 4,” Hale acknowledged. “Because I’m just like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy that I’m able to take my daughter and my wife to the premiere.’ My daughter’s a huge Taylor Swift fan. And so that happens and I’m like, ‘What’s going?’ I mean, we got to meet her publicist, you know? It’s just crazy stuff like that. It’s all exciting.”
During our interview (which you can watch below), Hale seamlessly switched into his Forky voice several times. “I can now turn it on and off,” Hale said. “And it was really fun, because when I came in for Toy Story 4, they had taken me from Buster [in Arrested Development] and from Gary off Veep, and put him into this fork, into this spork. And, because he was so anxious and he was kind of existential, and then through discussions, we talked about bringing a little more New York into him, and bringing a little more freedom and openness and joy, in addition to that kind of anxious trash element of him. So that kind of collaboration was really fun. The more times I did it, it just kind of locked in. And it was just so fun to say, ‘I’m trash’ over and over and over and over and over.”
Hale’s ability to so smoothly transform into Forky came in hand as the actor explained that he did not have access to the full screenplay while recording dialogue. “You only get certain papers, so you don’t see a whole story,” stated Hale. “And it wasn’t until I saw the movie that I really knew what was going on. But it’s so dependent on the director [Andrew Stanton]. He not only has to do all the voices, because no one else is around, but he also has to convey it in a way that he’s getting what he needs to make it as seamless as it is in the movie. So, so much is on them to convey that world…. Then they give the openness of like, ‘Okay, you got what’s on the page. Now just play. If anything comes up, just be silly.’ And that’s just a gift for a comic actor.”
Hale’s comedic work has earned him two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. His performance as Gary Walsh, the personal assistant to Vice President-turned-President Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), in Veep cemented Hale’s status as a comedic force to be reckoned with after portraying the emotionally stunted and socially awkward Buster Bluth in Arrested Development for so long.
Hale reflected on his initial anxieties transitioning from live-action to animation given working on projects like Toy Story 5 entail that he relies exclusively on his vocal performance. “If I’m completely candid, when I started doing animation before Toy Story, I was very, very nervous about that,” Hale explained. “I was nervous because, having done so much comedy, you rely on your nonverbal. I mean, literally, my character in Veep, he could only do [non-verbal]. He wasn’t even allowed to speak. So it was all nonverbal. It was all the body. And so, going into the booth, when you just have a microphone, there’s this thing that’s like, ‘Oh crap, I mean, can I deliver? You know, is it going to be funny? Because it’s just my voice.’ And then I kind of realized, ‘Okay, I’m gonna do the same performance in front of this mic that I would do in front of a camera, and I would just put it on steroids.’”
In playing Forky in Toy Story 5, Hale did exactly that. He explained how “many times the director would have to say, ‘Tony, you’ve got to stay close to the mic. You’ve got to stay close to the mic.’” He elaborated, “Because I was just all over the map. And [director Andrew Stanton] was like, ‘Okay, come here.’ And so that freedom is what I finally clicked into, just to do the same thing in front of the mic [as I do in live-action].”
Whether by pure coincidence or a product of Hale’s increasingly diversified filmography, the summer of 2026 is clearly the summer of Tony Hale. In addition to starring in the summer’s biggest theatrically released movie, he also has a role in the summer’s biggest streaming movie – the Netflix rom-com Office Romance.
But what distinguishes a project Hale is willing to invest his time and creative energy toward, compared to one he is not? Hale had a refreshingly humble answer to this question. “If you ever stop being grateful, someone just needs to punch me,” Hale said. “To even be invited to this party is overwhelming to me. I say that because this business is a roller coaster. I mean, people do see the work that I do, which is so flattering, but they don’t see the months and months and months of trying to get jobs and getting rejected and stuff like that. It’s not the easiest business, so I’m incredibly grateful.”
Hale elaborated, “If I’m trying to decide as to whether to do something, it’s all the kind of global picture of the project, meaning I’d love to have a talk with the director or the showrunner, just to find out, like, ‘Why do you want to tell [this story]? Where does this come from, and this character? And what’s going on here? Because they’re the creators of it.”
Clearly, Hale responded positively to what Pixar Animation Studios had in store for Forky, a character who has now featured in two theatrically released films and his very own Disney+ series. Hale commented on whether we could get a Season 2 of Forky Asks a Question. “I would love that,” he said.
But what else could the future hold for Forky, especially now that he’s a newlywed? “Somebody recently said that their child would be those tiny spoons that you get to work on oysters,” Hale remarked.
As Toy Story 5 hits theaters on June 19, it’s a reminder of just why Pixar’s franchise has endured for so long. “One thing I always love for people to discuss after a Toy Story [movie] is the reason why people keep coming back, [which] in my opinion is because you see this community of characters stick together,” Hale touchingly explained. “You see that family. You see that they’re rooting for each other. They got each other’s back. They support each other, and there’s such power in that. There’s magic in that and we have to always keep that. That’s the longevity of Toy Story. That’s what’s kept it alive.”
Indeed, Toy Story arguably feels more alive than ever in 2026, a remarkable 31 years after the original film debuted. With characters like the endearingly blunt and perpetually anxious Forky in the mix, audiences can be assured that the battle between toy and tech in Toy Story 5 is both a hilarious and thought-provoking one.
Watch our full interview with Toy Story 5 star Tony Hale below.
