Creators of the Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth have disclosed how the new voice actor for Missy will be introduced in Season 5. Big Mouth premiered on Netflix in 2017 and has since run for four seasons, with season 5 currently in development and a sixth episode run confirmed. The series was created by Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin. The coming-of-age, adult sitcom is a fictionalized retelling of Kroll and Goldberg's experiences going through puberty in middle school.
In August of 2020, prior to the release of Big Mouth season 4, it was announced that actress Jenny Slate was stepping down as the voice of Missy. The character, who is mixed-race and half-Jewish, was growing more challenging to explore for Slate, who is white, given Missy's cultural and racial identity. Moving forward, Missy will be portrayed by African-American writer-comedian Ayo Edebiri, who is known for her work in Sunnyside and Dickinson. Edebiri, who was already working as a writer on the show, took over for Slate in the second-to-last episode of season 4, during which Missy comes to an epiphany about her identity in a funhouse.
The creative team behind Big Mouth spoke about Missy's recasting during Saturday's USC Comedy Festival, Deadline reports. Levin revealed that "[Slate] always had questions and some hesitancy about whether it's appropriate to represent a character who...presents to the world as Black and identifies that way." The process in replacing Slate took a massive audition process, and as Goldberg puts it, casting Edebiri in the role "felt right":
“We auditioned a ton of actors to play Missy. Ultimately, Ayo felt right and maybe had a leg up because she was in the writers’ room, and had been part of all these conversations about how Missy was going to evolve, but I think it also just has a lot to do with who she is, as a person, and as a writer, because I think she identified with Missy growing up, and there’s something about Missy that you can’t fake.”
Recasting Missy also means looking at the Big Mouth story beyond season 4. The creators revealed the new episodes will include a larger focus on the characters' political identity and advocacy. With the increasing divisiveness of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and countless other events of 2020-2021, informed political advocacy is important now more than ever. Because Big Mouth boasts such a diverse team of writers and voice actors, the show is well-equipped to explore many different ideological perspectives. In light of Missy's recasting, the team understand that changes needed to be made in order to authentically represent each character.
Throughout the last year and a half, American politics has experienced a more prominent generational divide than before. To that end, Big Mouth can influence its audience – a relatively younger demographic – to enact positive, political change in their communities. Through the lens of animated comedy, Big Mouth has displayed its ability to tackle sensitive subject matter in a way that makes these topics approachable to its audience, as especially shown through Missy's identity crisis in season 4. There is no doubt that Big Mouth will invoke necessary political conversation, with dexterity and humor, when season 5 drops to Netflix.
Source: Deadline