St. Louis' accidental actress Phyllis Smith returns in 'Inside Out 2' (2024)

Some actors study the craft for years, working to be able to present true emotions on a stage or a screen.

Phyllis Smith kind of stumbled into it by accident.

It has worked out well for her. She began her career in front of the camera at the top, on the long-running, Emmy Award-winning sitcom “The Office”; she played the quiet and sometimes bizarre sales rep also named Phyllis.

Since then, she has been in the movie “Bad Teacher” — a real-life degree in elementary education from the University of Missouri-St. Louis may have helped inform that role — has performed in a handful of shows at the Muny and has received an Annie Award for outstanding voice actor for providing the voice of Sadness in the hit animated film “Inside Out.”

Now Smith is back in “Inside Out 2,” which opens June 14. Again, she provides the voice of Sadness, one of the emotions running the life of a young hockey player named Riley.

Riley has aged a few years since the last film and is now a teenager. That means a host of new emotions to contend with, including Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.

But Sadness plays a role in the emotional roller-coaster of a teenage girl, too. As in the first film, she is the yang to the yin of Joy, played again by Amy Poehler.

“I think Sadness is well-rooted in her feelings and her character. Joy still treats her the same, relies upon her, knows that she has knowledge. I don’t think the character herself has changed so much.”

Smith is from St. Louis — she went to Cleveland High School — and lives with her mother in the south city house in which she grew up. It’s a four-family flat, and when she was younger her grandfather lived on the other side of the building.

The story of how she became an actress is well-known, but it’s a classic.

For 19 years, she worked for casting agencies, which look for actors to fill out non-lead roles in films, television and commercials. When actors come in to audition for parts, someone at the agency reads the lines of the other characters.

Without realizing it, she became good at it.

She was reading lines to actors who were auditioning for “The Office,” and executive producer Greg Daniels and director Ken Kwapis, who grew up in Belleville, were so impressed that they wrote the part of Phyllis for her.

“I think I was honing a craft when I was reading with various actors that I didn’t realize I was honing,” she says. “That’s what I did for 19 years. I did it by osmosis, I guess.”

Even the job in casting came about by accident.

She was working as a receptionist at an aerospace company when she heard that one of the lawyer shows on television was looking for a mousy woman for a role. She had a short lunch time, and in her haste to get to the audition she tore her nylons. In the knee.

She says she told the casting director, “’Are you looking for mousy or tacky?’ and I showed them the hole in my knees. We got talking, and I thought I might be good at that.”

She was.

“They said I wasn’t mousy enough, but they needed a casting coordinator, which is the lowest rung on the totem pole,” she says.

Smith had a yen to perform ever since she was a child. She began taking dance lessons at 7, first ballet and then tap and jazz.

Dance was her passion. She was a cheerleader for the football Cardinals and danced burlesque — no stripping, but she did wear feathers — for Will B. Able and his Baggy Pants Revue in the 1970s. That revue had frequent shows at the Chase Park Plaza hotel, and also toured the country.

Able, whose real name was Willard S. Achorn, was a New York actor — he had a memorable role as a scarecrow in a series of Quaker Corn Bran cereal commercials. He held dancer auditions in St. Louis on several occasions; Smith tried out but was never hired, so she stopped going to his auditions.

When he came to town again, he said he’d love to hire Smith. She said, “Well, why don’t you?” And he did.

“We danced the cancan from the Moulin Rouge, because his wife actually danced at the Moulin Rouge. We had the originally choreography,” she says.

But it was the cancan that eventually ended her career as a dancer, she told St. Louis Magazine in 2007. She landed wrong while doing the jump split that ends the number, and tore her ACL.

She stopped performing after that, but she credits the creative discipline that dance instilled in her with helping her to find her way as an actress.

“Any art form you can transfer to other art forms. When I danced, I did various types of dance, different kinds of ballet and different characters in various ballets. I think that would transfer in experience,” she says.

The chance for a career as an actor did not come for many years. But she knew what to do because of advice a singing teacher gave her when she was younger.

“One thing she said to me is you have to be prepared for when the opportunity comes. I didn’t know the opportunity would happen when I was in my later years. I started dancing when I was 7, and I think it culminated when I was given the opportunity to do ‘The Office,’” she says.

“I thought it was gone, that the ship had sailed. It wasn’t something I was looking for.”