Greta Lee was 13 when Toy Story opened on November 22, 1995. She saw it twice that opening weekend at her family’s local theatre in Northridge, California, and once again with her grandmother on the Saturday of Thanksgiving. Thirty-one years later, the Past Lives star is voicing the antagonist of Pixar’s Toy Story 5, an iPad-shaped tablet character named Lilypad. “It is such a wild thing,” Lee told Fandango this week, “to be part of something that I experienced myself as a kid, and now to experience it again with my own kids.”
Lilypad is the franchise’s first explicitly tech-coded antagonist. The character, a personal-organiser tablet ten-year-old Bonnie inherits during the film’s opening act, represents what director Andrew Stanton has described in trade interviews as “the existential threat to the toys’ entire economy.” The toys, in Toy Story 5, do not lose because the kids stop loving them. They lose because the kids have already moved on to a screen.
Lee’s casting was announced in February. She joined the project after Stanton, by his own account in a Fandango Q&A panel, watched her work in Celine Song’s 2023 Past Lives and called her agent the next morning. The first lockdown of the role happened over Zoom. Lee read for it from a hotel in Hong Kong during the press cycle for The Morning Show Season 4, where she also has a recurring role. The character, in early test screenings, drew the laugh that has, by Pixar’s count, become the film’s signature.
Lee has, in interviews, framed Lilypad less as a villain than as a believer with very specific principles. “She thinks she is helping,” Lee told AOL Entertainment in the same press cycle. “She also thinks Woody and Buzz are obsolete, but she does not think she is being mean about it. She is, in her own head, just being kind.” The role is, in animation terms, the kind of comedic-villain part that wins Annie Awards.
The film opens wide June 19. Pixar has, by its own internal counter, already cleared $44 million in pre-sales, the strongest pre-release showing of any 2026 animated film. The June 9 world premiere drew rapturous first reactions, with critics on the social embargo singling out Lee’s performance and the closing-credits Taylor Swift original song as the film’s two MVP elements. Joan Cusack’s first red-carpet appearance in 11 years drew the night’s loudest cheer; Tom Hanks’s now-viral marriage advice to Swift drew the night’s most-quoted line.
Lee, by her own description in the Fandango interview, watched the finished film with her two children on a flatscreen at home. Her older child, eight, recognised Lilypad’s voice instantly. Her younger child, four, did not. “That,” Lee said, “is exactly the right ratio.” She will be at the Pixar campus in Emeryville on the first showing’s Friday morning, watching with the animators who actually built the character around her line readings. According to Syfy’s coverage of Stanton’s commentary track, the Lilypad design went through seven major iterations before locking on the iPad-shaped silhouette audiences will see on Friday.
The wider Toy Story 5 press cycle has been notably crowded. Hanks, Allen, Cusack and Conan O’Brien have all done print covers in the last six weeks. Swift’s recruitment to the project came with a separate ten-page Vogue spread. Lee, by Pixar’s framing in the run-up, was the one performer the studio chose not to make available for a glossy print interview. The reasoning, given to Variety by Pixar’s marketing chief Jessica Boyd, was simple: “We wanted people to meet Lilypad before they met her actor. That is the only way the villain works.”
Lee returns to live-action work this autumn with the Apple TV+ Severance Season 3 production, which begins shooting in Newark in October. Past Lives director Celine Song’s next feature, The Materialists, is in post-production with Lee in a supporting role. The animation work on Toy Story 5, by her own counting in the Fandango interview, took her exactly fourteen days of recording over a twenty-two-month window. She still, she said, has the first script page she ever read for Lilypad pinned above her desk.
