She will be played by Natalie Morales.
Mey RudeA gay lady’s gotta do what a gay lady’s gotta do!
Queer actress Natalie Morales is adding some canon LGBTQ+ representation to the world of the Rugrats this year when she’ll be playing Phil and Lil’s mom Betty, reimagined as a queer single mom in the new Paramount+ reboot.
Morales told The A.V. Club that she couldn’t be more excited about the role. “Betty is a single mom with her own business who has twins and still has time to hang out with her friends and her community, and I think it’s just so great because examples of living your life happily and healthily as an out queer person is just such a beacon for young queer people who may not have examples of that,” she said.
“And yeah, Betty is a fictional cartoon,” Morales added, “but even cartoons were hugely influential for me as a kid and if I’d been watching Rugrats and seen Betty casually talking about her ex-girlfriend, I think at least a part of me would have felt like things might be okay in the future.”
She also knows that updating the character this way isn’t exactly a surprise. She thinks that “anyone who watched the original show may have had an inkling Betty was a member of the alphabet mafia.”
Morales starred in shows like The Middleman, The Grinder, Parks and Recreation, and Abby’s, where she played the bisexual titular character, before joining the cast of Netflix’s series Dead to Me. Her directorial film debut, Plan B, is being released on Hulu this month. She came out in 2017 in an essay she published online.
“I don’t like labeling myself, or anyone else,” she wrote, “but if it’s easier for you to understand me, what I’m saying is that I’m queer. What queer means to me is just simply that I’m not straight. That’s all. It’s not scary, even though that word used to be really, really scary to me.”
According to The A.V. Club, this updated version of Betty will be a football-loving cafe owner (the cafe is called Betty’s Beans) who loves to crack jokes about her ex-girlfriends. She sounds perfect to us.
Rugrats premieres on Paramount+ today, May 27.
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