Miss Piggy is returning to the spotlight.
A movie about the Muppets character, written by “Oh, Mary!” creator Cole Escola and produced by Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, is in early development at Disney, TheWrap has learned.
Lawrence revealed the existence of the project on Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ “Las Culturistas” podcast on Wednesday, saying, “I don’t know if I can announce this, but I’m just going to – Emma Stone and I are producing a Miss Piggy movie and Cole is writing it.”
She also said that she and Stone would probably make an appearance in the film, telling the hosts, “I think so, we have to.”
Miss Piggy initially started as a background player on “The Muppet Show” but grew into one of the most popular characters on the series, known for her egocentric behavior, karate chops and on-again/off-again love affair with Kermit (the 1984 film “The Muppets Take Manhattan” ends with Miss Piggy and Kermit’s star-studded wedding). On May 10, 1990, the Jim Henson Company issued a press release that Kermit and Piggy had broken up, with plans for a tell-all autobiography and other events to follow, but Jim Henson’s death, just days later, put the kibosh on those plans. More recently in the 2015 faux documentary series “The Muppets,” the rocky status of their relationship was explored.
Frank Oz co-created the character and performed as Miss Piggy from 1976 to 2002, after which Eric Jacobson took over.
In 1979, Oz explained her genesis to the New York Times: “I remember that Miss Piggy used to be, in the very first year of the show, just a nondescript pig puppet that we had originally used prior to ‘The Muppet Show,’ in a halfhour pilot called ‘sex and Violence’ … There was a bit in that pilot with a whole bunch of pigs and she was just one of the pigs. But in one rehearsal, I was working as Miss Piggy with Jim, who was doing Kermit, and the script called for her to slap him. Instead of a slap, I gave him a funny karate hit. Somehow, that hit crystallized her character for me — the coyness hiding the aggression; the conflict of that love with her desire for a career; her hunger for a glamour image; her tremendous out‐and‐out ego — all those things are great fun to do.”
Oz said the character has had a “sad, difficult life,” and outlined her upbringing in a document that read, in part, that “she grew up in a small town; her father died when she was young; her mother wasn’t that nice to her. She had to enter beauty contests to survive. She has a lot of aggressiveness, but she needs a lot to survive — as many single women do. She has a lot of vulnerability, which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar.”
