*Missy-related spoilers for season 4.*
There was a lot of discourse about race, especially Blackness, in the summer of 2020, and while the protests and activism have yet to result in the type of systemic change that community activists are really striving for (police and prison reform, economic opportunities, educational equity,) a lot of smaller, arguably cosmetic changes have been made. We’ve seen a lot of symbolic gestures that are nice but don’t amount to very much, and a number of companies have ditched mascots/logos rooted in racism, from Aunt Jemima to the former mascot of the Washington Football Team. The world of voice-acting, meanwhile, saw a larger push toward casting people of color to voice people of color. That’s been a trend in voice-acting in recent years, and it’s served films like Coco and Raya and the Last Dragon well, but in 2020, a number of white voice-actors on TV shows stepped aside to make room for their characters to be cast more appropriately. Some of these were actors from long-running shows like The Simpsons, while others were from newer shows that ought to have “known better” in the first place, including Big Mouth.
In June of 2020, Jenny Slate announced that she was stepping down from playing Missy. I like Slate a lot as an actress, but this was the right decision and I appreciated it. However, when season 4 debuted, Slate was still voicing the role; Ayo Edebiri, Missy’s new voice actress, didn’t take over until the tail-end of the season’s penultimate episode. After the fact, I nosed around online and found that season 4 was already in the can when Slate announced her decision to step down, and rather than have Edebiri spend her first season imitating Slate’s already-recorded/animated performance, the show decided to make the switch at a pivotal moment for Missy toward the end of the season.
You see, Missy’s main arc in season 4 was already about exploring her racial identity as a mixed girl, which makes the retroactive decision to recast even more important. Because I do really enjoy seeing Missy exploring her Blackness – getting her hair done by her older cousins, bonding with DeVon and learning about code-switching, responding to microaggressions – but seeing that storyline with Slate still voicing the character is uncomfortable.
Throughout the season, there are a few explicit references to the fact that Missy is voiced by a white actress, most notably a moment when Missy squirms over her cousins using the N-word. When they tell her that it’s fine for Black people to say it, Missy looks directly into the “camera” to re-emphasize that she in particular can’t say it. And just generally, it’s not great to have it be Slate voicing Missy’s hurt feelings over another girl making fun of her braids and other very race-specific beats in her storyline.
Another uncomfortable angle here is the fact that this racial-identity journey is Missy’s only storyline for the whole season. She gets several highlight episodes that focus on her navigating her Blackness, but in episodes that don’t involve that plotline, she hardly appears at all, maybe just popping up for a line or two but rarely taking a meaningful part in anyone else’s plot. Since my Big Mouth episode reviews come courtesy of The Book of Rannells, I’ll draw a parallel to another Andrew Rannells project, Girls. In season 5, when Elijah has his only major arc that’s truly about him as he fumbles through his relationship with Dill, he almost immediately stops having scenes with Hannah and the other girls. His own plot is off in its own part of the show, virtually cut off from all the other major charactes. That’s kind of what’s happening with Missy here. We don’t see her much with Andrew, Jessi, Nick, or Jay, and the most prominent characters to appear in her storyline are her parents, her cousins (who were only introduced in this season,) and DeVon.
All that said, I do really like how this plot resolves, which coincides with the change in voice-acting. During episode 9’s “Horrority House,” Missy, like the other main characters, is drawn into a fantasy sequence that feeds on her inner conflict. For Missy, she finds herself in a room full of Us-like funhouse mirrors, and in each one, she sees a different Missy. “Woke” Missy, history nerd Missy, unabashedly-horny Missy, geeky fangirl Missy, and so on. Her escape from her hallucination involves smashing all the mirrors, after which a piece from each “Missy” is puzzled together into one whole, a conglomeration of all the different parts of her. All the pieces cohere into one, and this is the Missy who emerges, voice by Edebiri instead of Slate.
I like that, that the change in voice actress is done meaningfully at a climactic moment. Instead of just quietly debuting Edebiri at the start of season 5, the show draws attention to it by switching voice actresses in the middle of a scene, right at the culmination of Missy’s journey. Edebiri does a fine job with the character, and while I can hear that she’s not Slate, she still sounds like Missy to me, which is key. I don’t agree with all the decisions the show made here, going back to casting Slate as Missy in the first place, but I appreciate how they bring it to bear in the end.
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