Coming off of a star-making turn as the writer-director of Broadway’s Oh, Mary!, Escola is the perfect person to give Miss Piggy her first lead role. The actor (who is nonbinary) has said they imbued the character of Mary Todd Lincoln with Muppet qualities. “The beauty of Miss Piggy, and what attracts me to her, is that she believes she is an ingénue,” Escola told The Daily Beast in June 2024. “She’s not actually a diva, or she is, but she believes she’s an ingénue. And what she wants desperately is for everybody to see her as an ingénue, but cannot help the rageful, selfish side of her. I so relate to that. I think everyone can. Like, ‘This is a version of me I want everyone to see,’ but meanwhile I am an absolute terror that I think I’m keeping concealed. But I’m actually not.”
In fact, when asked in a July 2025 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast who they’d like to see play the titular role in an Oh, Mary! movie, Escola suggested, “Miss Piggy as Mary Todd Lincoln, and then everyone else is human.” They quickly added, “Actually, cut this, I’m gonna be talking to Disney tomorrow.” That seemed like a joke at the time, but now they’ve got a Miss Piggy movie in development, so the joke is really on us for not taking it seriously.
While Escola focuses on putting Miss Piggy in the spotlight, Lawrence told Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang on Las Cultch that she pursued Mary Todd Lincoln as her Broadway debut. “The only time that I wanted to do theater is when I wanted to do Oh, Mary!” She explained. “The schedule just would’ve—they were like, ‘Okay, well it’s eight shows a week, and like six weeks of rehearsal,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, do you guys have daycare there, or…?’ It just wouldn’t have worked.” Lawrence said she doesn’t think she’d be good on stage, but felt like she could’ve done the comedic play “because the whole thing is a joke that she’s in on and so I thought that I could be like, big and in on the joke.” Lawrence admitted she doesn’t think she’s very good at comedy at all (despite positive reviews of her performance in No Hard Feelings), but hopefully she’ll soon get a crash course from her co-star Miss Piggy.
