Incredibles 2 Interview with Sophia Bush (voice of “Voyd”)

Today is the last day of sharing our interviews from the Incredibles 2 event. They are all great and I highly encourage you to read through them all. You can find all of the posts we have shared about the Incredibles 2 here. I am excited to share our interview with Sophia Bush (voice of “Voyd”) with you. She is very smart and a great voice for women!

When she came in, she also told us about her 30-Day-No-Throwaway challenge. She is trying to only use reusable things as much as possible. She said “I encourage everyone to join me. It’s been really fun.”

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Incredibles 2 Interview with Sophia Bush (voice of “Voyd”)

How did you fan girl that moment [/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][pictured above] since you didn’t work with the other actors?

Sophia : You go in and it’s you and Brad in the room. He’s such a phenomenal director, and as any good director, he’s really got the movie put together in his head. Brad knows what take he’s gonna get from Holly, so he knows when I’m throwing things at him which take of mine is right. He’s the mad genius scientist, which is awesome.

For me, I had to think a lot about who this girl is. You know, Violet is a teenager. Voyd is a young woman. She represents, to me, so many of the girls who I spend so much of my life talking to, girls that are in high school, college, post-college, trying to figure out who they are.

And the way that I related it was this, I thought a lot about being a young girl in this world of the Incredibles, who has powers, who thinks it’s the coolest. And then you see people like you become illegal. And your parents tell you, you have to hide who you are because you could be jailed. You could be killed. You could be subject to harassment. But you grew up looking up to Elastigirl. She was on your TV. There’s no one in your town like you.

She is that idol who made this girl, who had to dim her light for so long, feel like eventually everything was gonna be okay. And you see her expressing her identity. Like, she has turquoise hair and a side shave. This is a bold expression of her inner radicalness, but she’s had to hide her biggest magic. And she gets to meet the person who made her feel like one day it was gonna be okay. And that made everything about why she just couldn’t figure out how to hold it together.

It made it really, really personal for me, because it was something that’s a fight I’ve been a part of in my real life, and it helped me own the moment for this sweet girl in the recording booth.

As a woman who’s heavily involved in activism for women in Hollywood, what did it mean to you when you found out that this was like a strong women’s centric movie?

Sophia : Well, I told Brad he’s clearly psychic because this movie was four years in the making. So, this was pre the Time’s Up conversation being had. This was pre a lot of these studies about gender parody and even current stages of pay disparity, our lack of paid family leave in this country. Even when we look at some of the statistics that have come out about how many dads are actually now the stay-at-home parent, how many women earn equal to their male partners, how many women are actually the primary breadwinner in their households.

And Brad was like “I don’t know. I just thought it would be funny to freak Bob out” is always his public answer, but then we’re talking backstage and he’s like, well, you know, my wife’s a superhero. She’s the coolest woman I know.

The movie welcomes everybody to the table. I’ve not heard a single guy be like, oh, that’s like a woman’s movie. They love the movie.

I think it’s really refreshing in a time where people are a bit tense about where all of this goes from here to remind them that it can go to a place like this, that instead of othering people we should welcome everyone to the table, because if everyone puts their own personal brand of magic on the world, the world gets better.

What superpower would you like to have in real life?

Sophia : I mean I would love to have Voyd’s powers. No like. They’re really badass. But I think about convenience, and whatever the power is that would allow me to teleport, I’d like that. ‘Cause like I have to get on a red-eye tonight. Do you know how happy I’d be to just like grab my bags and twitch my nose like Samantha from Bewitched and just be in another city? Like, no more TSA, no more bad airport food– it would be the biggest game changer of my life. I would love that. Imagine like not having to sit in rush hour traffic. You just think and you’re at your meeting across town. Anyway, that’s for LA people clearly.

How did the role come about for you? Did you audition? Did they present it to you?

Sophia : Things don’t happen this way. People think things happen this way, and I’m like maybe for like Tom Hanks and Jennifer Lawrence but not for most of us. I was sitting at lunch with a friend of mine, and I got a text message that said ‘open your email’ because people know that I do not email. I’m like allergic to it. I opened my email and there was this letter from my agent, and I sort of started having an outer-body experience and like couldn’t figure out what I was reading, because I got very emotional. And I opened the PDF, and the scan that was attached to it was the actual letter from Brad Bird on Pixar letterhead offering me the part, telling me who Voyd was, asking me to come and join the Incredibles family. And at the bottom of the page are all of the Incredibles family in like this beautiful 2-D drawing.

And I was like what? And I screamed so loud the whole restaurant turned and looked at me. I was morbidly embarrassed and also very excited. And I asked him, I said I don’t understand how this happened. And he said, well, you know, years ago you came up here to learn about animation, and I did. I spent a day like asking all of the animators crazy questions about code, like a total nerd. It was the best day of my life. And they have a great care there, so lunch was also very nice.

And he said, you know, what we started to do was look for something for you knowing how excited you are about this whole universe. And they take samplings of your voice from other jobs. So, they basically cut generic enough sentences of your dialogue and then cut it together with the other actors in Pixar films and figure out who’s voice they like the sound of your voice with. And they liked me and Holly’s voices together. And I was like she’s a queen. I am dead. Like, all of my dreams have come true.

So, since you spent a day up at Pixar watching the animation process, what about that process surprises you the most?

Sophia : I wish that they would do a sort of behind-the-scenes package for people to see the stages, because if you know how many layers of tech — I mean it’s literally like — it’s like a lasagna. It’s like layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of code and specificity. And there’s a whole pass on the movie done just to animate hair. And there’s a whole pass on the movie done just to put the right textures in clothing. It’s so crazy. And we got to see a rough cut of the film back in February.

And there were whole bits of it not animated yet. Like, our characters were like floating around with no arms like ghosts, [LAUGHS] you know. And there were certain scenes where they were animated, but the mouths hadn’t been yet, because our dialogue had just been finalized. So, then they have to do the mouth to match your speaking voice. It is so much more complex and brilliant and genius and cool than anybody knows. And to them they’re like, well, we present what’s perfect to the world, and I’m like show them everything.

I’m like I wanna see the unretouched pictures of these people, too. It’s really — it’s phenomenal and hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of people work on every movie.

How did it feel when you got the custom clutch that you carried on the red carpet for your character?

Sophia : Very cool. I’m very, very lucky. So, this fabulous designer named Bret is the woman behind Edie Parker. And back in the day, she ran all of these big fashion brands and was always one of those really nice people who like I’d see at an event where I’d feel completely like a fish outta water and intimidated. I’m like I don’t know what to do here. And she’d be like let’s go in the corner and talk about life and have a tequila. I was like you’re great. So she’s just cool. And she decided to start this line, and I’ve carried her bags forever, a, because they’re beautiful, and because I like to support badass women that are for other women.

And we contacted her a while back and said I’m gonna send a rendering to you so that you can design a bag, ’cause I’d love to take something that is about Voyd to the premier. And she sent me four versions of bags, and we picked one where like her little mask was on the side so I could also like do the manicure and have a whole story. I was like I have never been more prepared for something. I’m usually the person who my friends are like you didn’t even get a manicure. Like, honestly, what is wrong with you. You are fired from being a lady. So, I really felt like I put it all together, and it was just…what a cool thing to have, you know, ’cause like I don’t get to keep that vintage Versace dress, but I get to keep the bag. I have something. I have a memento.

Before we started the interview, she said “I just saw Sam in the hallway and he was like fashion, and I was like this is my super suit. So, I feel really good about it.” She is talking about the fab outfit that she had on the day of the interviews. You can really see it in the picture above.

Do you have an interest in tech?

Sophia : Yeah, very much so. I’ve actually been investing in tech companies for about ten years. I think that when we talk about parody, for example, I think we have a problem in that women when they make any money at all — and I’m not talking like you don’t have to be Warren Buffet and be a billionaire and be 65 before you can be charitable or before you can start investing. That is a lie. You can invest a couple hundred dollars here, a couple thousand dollars here. There are ways to get women in the financial game that we don’t talk about because we don’t talk to women about money.

And oddly enough we don’t talk to women about their healthcare or their bodies either. So we really don’t talk to us about anything but like makeup and hair products. So, we need to change the conversation. But when women make any money at all, they’re encouraged to donate to charity, which is something that I do. But men, when they make money, are encouraged to become investors. And this is a major point of disparity in our society. And so, for me, the reason that back in the day I started writing like very small checks. I’m still not writing huge checks.

I remember there was an announcement probably like eight years ago now that like Ashton Kutcher and I invested in the Seed Round. It was a very cool tech company. And I was like don’t put my name next to his name. He wrote a check like 18 times bigger than mine. That guy — he has all of the money. I’m trying to catch up. But I realize that even getting the game in small ways changes who’s on board calls, changes who’s on advisor calls. We need more women having seats at those tables.

And so, for me, being a person who is very intuitive about design and who also loves tech, the world of UI design, interface, the way that things are coded, the way that they function on mobile, these are things that I can have input for companies that very often have these engineers who are so into their world that they’re not thinking about how most of us are not gonna use their product. So, that was a really fun way for me to foray into that.

I’ve spent a very long time supporting a badass woman of color in New York. Her name is Reshma Saujani. She created a company called Girls Who Code. She is incredible. My character is a woman in STEM. She literally manipulates space-time. It’s so cool to me. So, to talk to women about how science, technology, engineering, medicine, these are fields that they should be in. They should be owning. That is very exciting to me.

Sophia is so passionate and I loved listening to her talk and charging us all up about the things that are so important right now like woman’s rights. She does a great job as Voyd in the Incredibles 2 and I hope they make another one so we can get to know more of these new characters better!

The Incredibles 2 is another fantastic film from Disney-Pixar. Here is the trailer: