Joining a number of other high-profile shows, Netflix's Big Mouth has announced that Jenny Slate, who provides the voice for bi-racial character Missy, will be exiting the show to be replaced by an actor of color, Ayo Edibiri. In the wake of the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, actors involved with numerous television shows and films have expressed growing concern over problems of whitewashing in mainstream media.
On Big Mouth, Missy is the child of Black and Jewish parents. Speaking with Vulture, series creator Nick Kroll noted that Missy's parents "shied away from tough conversations around race. [She] has grown up in a bi-racial household and has been told, ‘We don’t see race.'" As a young Black woman growing up in a predominantly white area, however, Missy, over the course of the upcoming fourth season, starts to realize some of her difference.
The writers have planned at least one episode, titled "A Very Special 9/11 Episode", that will deal specifically with code-switching. In language, this is a process where individuals shift and change the way that they speak, between languages or variations of languages. In the context of Missy and her experience, code-switching refers to the whitewashing of language, and the way that a person of color has to change their linguistic practices in order to fit into a white-dominated language.
In the episode, Missy comes to realize how switched her language has been, even jumping to a meta-textual level: "I’m really struggling with my racial identity right now...My mom’s white, my dad’s Black, I’m voiced by a white actress who’s 37 years old." The episode was written before Slate's departure, and Kroll also emphasized that it was Slate herself who approached the showrunners with concerns about voicing a Black character.
Big Mouth stars Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Jason Mantzoukas, Jenny Slate and Fred Armisen, with Maya Rudolph and Jordan Peele. Seasons 1-3 are currently streaming on Netflix. Season 4 premieres Dec. 4.