Two months after Jenny Slate announced that she would no longer voice the character of Missy on “Big Mouth”, Netflix’s animated puberty comedy has found her replacement: writer, producer, comedian and actor Ayo Edebiri.
“I was definitely a very uncomfortable child, so I think the show speaks to that and a lot of those feelings, which still resonate with me as an adult,” Edebiri says. Variation. “I’m back home now in my bedroom and on my bookshelf in between ‘A series of unfortunate events’ is Bill Clinton’s autobiography and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and a translation of ‘The Iliad’ into Latin. I was a real dork “I do not think I have to go too far to contact Missy.”
While Slate will continue to speak Missy for the majority of the fourth season (the premiere date has not yet been announced), Edebiri will take over the role in the penultimate episode. She booked the role just a few weeks ago and has already recorded her season 4 dialogue. She also joined the show’s writers’ room for the fifth season – a job she actually booked and first started working on, given the schedule of break stories and penny scripts.
“As a writer, my goal is never to figure out, ‘Oh let’s make myself a part of this show.’ As I write, I serve my boss’ vision and I want to be helpful in whatever ways I can be and borrow my ideas and my jokes and whatever else they need, “says Edebiri. But she admits “because I had the experience of being in the room and knowing the story, I think that helped with the level of comfort” when I stepped into the recording booth, especially on such an accelerated timeline .
Originally co-created by Andrew Goldberg Variation, Slate would talk Missy through the entire fourth season. “By the time we made the decision to cast Ayo, we had finished the entire season 4 and delivered it to Netflix,” he shares. With production time on animation, the team did not think they could replace the entire season of Missy’s dialogue – nor did they want to “Ayo had to start her journey with this part by adapting what Jenny was already doing,” he continues. “That’s not a way for her to make herself.”
Goldberg credits co-creator Jennifer Flackett for finding a moment in the penultimate episode of the season that felt like “a really organic and cool place” to bring Edebiri in earlier than originally planned.
‘It’s about Missy’s continuous evolution as a person – that she has all these different parts of who she is. There’s the sideline Missy and the sexually adventurous Missy, mirror Missy, and then this Missy she’s discovered [in Season 4] by hanging out with her cousins and really taking a look at her Black identity, ”says co-creator Nick Kroll about the moment.
Once they found that moment, it turned out that the transition “would not be a surprising change for viewers of the show,” he explains.
“The transition is a nice farewell to Jenny at that moment as well in a way,” Edebiri adds, noting that she wanted to pay “tribute” to the previous performance “while also bringing some news. I found, also because of the work that Jenny did. ”
Ever since Edebiri became a member of the “Big Mouth” writing space, she understood the sensitivity of both the character and the general tone of the story before she was cast. But just because the “Big Mouth” team already knew that Edebiri did not mean she did not have to audition. Slate, who has spoken out about Missy since the show’s inception in 2017, announced on Instagram in June that she would step down from the show’s role because “Black characters in an animated show by Black people must be played. ” At the time, the show’s co-creators also posted a statement on social media apologizing and regretting casting a white actor to express a biracial character, saying they were looking forward to it. to recreate the growth of the character once. Since this announcement came so publicly and before they even discussed to cast anyone new, the team could not throw a wider if they were looking for the new Missy then otherwise.
“We had a lot of people submit from Twitter and Instagram and we brought in a bunch of those people,” Kroll says. “We let people tape and submit themselves – and a few of those people came down on the last very short list of people we were considering hiring.”
Edebiri shares that she recorded a “range” from Missy for her first audition and then ended up with multiple callbacks and a few sessions with the producers where she further tested dialogue and sounds. Finally, Goldberg says what distinguished her was that she “just brings so much of herself to the role.”
Most recently, Edebiri was a writer on NBC’s ‘Sunnyside’. A stand-up comedian, she also co-hosts “Iconography”, a podcast, for Forever Dog. Her other upcoming screen credits include co-producing “Mulligan,” Robert Carlock and Tina Fey’s upcoming animated series for Netflix; starring in the upcoming animated series “We Lost Our Human” for Netflix, and writing and acting in the second season of “Dickinson” for Apple TV Plus. (For the latter, Hattie’s role was written for her after she joined the writers’ room.) She is reprimanded by Odenkirk Provissiero Ent., CAA and Del Shaw Moonves.
“My parents are both people who did not really get what they were doing; they just worked jobs. And they were like, ‘If you’re going to go for it, go for it.’ That I go for it! Seit Edebiri.
Now, says Kroll, if a black actor portrayed Missy in ‘Big Mouth’, the show will allow ‘more nuanced stories to be told about Missy’s identity.’ Although he admits that when they first created the character, it was, “OK this is a dirty girl who happens to be Black”, the conversation has shifted over the years and the writers’ room has encouraged more of a missionary exploration Blackness.
“This allows us to talk about the growth of this character in a way that we hope to talk about all the growth of our characters,” Kroll says. “This change of actor is an elevated version of that, but a good example of how our characters are always evolving.”
For Edebiri, this comes with a responsibility to tell in a funny way “stories that you traditionally or dislike”. “There are lessons to be learned [from the show] and it grows painful – like in the show, ”she says. ‘For me, it’s nothing short of exciting. As a performance and as a room and as a moment it feels like it’s happening, and hopefully it’s here to stay. ”
