There’s a version of Tony Hale’s life that goes differently.
In the early 2000s, fresh off a national Pepto-Bismol commercial, he walked into his 10-year high school reunion riding what felt like momentum. People recognized him. They knew the ad. For one night, he was the guy who made it.
He left feeling worse than when he arrived.
“I put a lot of energy into kind of that fantasy of what it was going to feel like walking into that room,” he said. “After that 10-year reunion, I think I felt worse than when I came in, because I had given something like that so much energy. That’s just fleeting. It’s stupid. It’s just — you really see how shallow this is.”
It’s a small story, but it explains a lot. Because Tony Hale has spent the better part of two decades in a business that runs entirely on that reunion-night feeling. And he’s spent just as long figuring out why it doesn’t fill anything up.
Toy Story 5 opens June 19, and Hale is back as Forky — the spork-turned-toy who spent Toy Story 4 trying to throw himself in the trash. It’s a funny bit of casting symmetry. Buster Bluth, tethered to his mother by something between devotion and terror. Gary Walsh, whose entire identity is organized around a woman who barely registers his existence. Forky, who looks at himself and sees garbage. Hale keeps returning to characters who don’t quite believe they belong somewhere. He doesn’t think that’s coincidental.
“I love it just because I’m a broken mess,” he’s said. “I’m a disaster. I’m a huge work in progress.”
What’s made Hale unusual — not just as a performer but as a person navigating the specific psychic conditions of celebrity — is that he’s done the actual work of thinking through what’s underneath all of it. He didn’t just notice the reunion felt hollow and move on. He let it mean something.
“I meet a lot of people who have gotten their dream and realized that it didn’t satisfy them the way they thought it was going to satisfy them,” he said. “This also can be a business where you’re always looking to the next thing. It’s never enough. Success is insatiable, fame is insatiable.”
His framework for all of it comes down to a distinction he draws between being famous and being known. The example he uses is specific. Somewhere in Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a person working at a mall. They walk in every morning and get genuine hellos — people who are actually glad to see them, who’d notice if they didn’t show up. No performance required.
“Everybody wants to be known,” Hale explains. “Everybody wants to be seen. And people look at fame as the ultimate being known, the ultimate being seen, when in actuality, if you’re known by people that you know love you, that’s all the known you need. And actually people that are really, really famous, they’re actually less known than a person who’s working at the mall in Birmingham, Alabama, because that person can walk into a place and whatever ‘hello’ they get, whatever somebody’s giving, there’s no strings attached.”
That kind of thinking doesn’t show up in a lot of profiles of people who have two Emmys and a Pixar franchise. It comes from his faith, which Hale talks about the same way he talks about everything — without performance.
“The older I get, my relationship with God and my faith — it’s always been everything to me — but there’s more of an ownership of it now,” he said. “God really is the only reason I’m doing anything I’m doing.”
That ownership started to shift how he thought about the roles he was drawn to. Buster and Gary aren’t just funny — they’re portraits of what happens when people organize their lives around the wrong thing. And Hale takes that seriously. He’s not against redemptive storytelling, but he thinks there’s something equally valuable in watching what brokenness actually costs.
“It’s not like I’m against art that puts a bow on it, because we all need hope,” he said. “I love redemptive work. But I also love art that really shows brokenness.”
He points to Selena Meyer — Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Veep — as an example of what he means. An unrepentant narcissist, not redeemed, not softened. Just a person who kept taking and eventually reaped exactly what she sowed.
“Selena is an awful person,” Hale says. “She’s a very broken human being who is all about herself. And the fact is that reaps isolation. That reaps destruction. I think our society invests more and more and more. It’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not enough. But everybody knows that when you do give of yourself, when you are kind — it reaps such a better outcome.”
He’s aware of the irony that he’s saying this from the middle of one of the biggest animated franchises in film history. Forky is back, the toys are back, and by any external measure Tony Hale has more than arrived. He just doesn’t think about it in those terms anymore.
“So much of my life, it was very easy to live in this fantasy of, ‘What does arrived look like? What does making it look like?'” he said. “The older I get, and the more I do it, the more it really brings me back down to the simple. Really arriving and making it is just being as present as I can be, in a situation and connected to people.”
He’s also the first to admit it doesn’t come naturally. “I talk about being present so much because I suck at it,” he said. “My default is being somewhere else. It’s more of a challenge to be where I am, so it’s a real daily choice for me.”
That honesty is the thing that makes Hale worth taking seriously — not the Emmys or the fact that he’s been in the cultural conversation for 20 years. He’s a person who got what he wanted and had the clarity to notice it wasn’t the thing. And he’s been trying to live differently ever since.