Golden Globe Awards hosts past and present are coming together with news that Tina Fey—who’s co-hosting this years ceremony with Amy Poehler this Sunday—is in late-stage negotiations to join the cast of The Muppets 2 as the female lead.

Fey joins Ricky Gervais—who hosted the Globes the past few years—to make up the two human leads. Fey would apparently be playing a Russian gulag prison guard. Huh!

The sequel to Walt Disney’s hit revival of Jim Henson’s creations, The Muppets, is set to begin production come this January. With that fast approaching, the human cast is starting to take shape.

First came the announcement that Ty Burrell (Modern Family, Dawn of the Dead) would be starring as one of the live-action leads. Now comes word that comedian Ricky Gervais has entered into negotiations for another human lead in The Muppets 2.

It wouldn’t be much of a Muppets movie without a few original songs and last year Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords wrote almost all of the songs for last year’s The Muppets – and has an Academy Award to show for it. Now Collider reports that he is coming back to write new songs for The Muppets 2, which is said to feature a crime caper plot. Though no major stars are attached to the film, Christoph Waltz is in talks to appear as an Interpol inspector. James Bobin, who co-wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller, will direct.

Production is set to begin in January in Pinewood Studios in England for a December 2013 release. No doubt Disney wants to capitalize on the same success it had when The Muppets opened in theaters around the Thanksgiving Holiday. No doubt the studio is looking to avoid the box office onslaught that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire will cause during the Thanksgiving holiday, so a winter holiday release seemed like the second-best option.

It’s not entirely uncommon to hear of swirling casting rumors before a film heads into production. But when a casting rumor is this big, one can’t help but share the exciting possibility of a great actor joining a great movie.

According to sources, Christoph Waltz is in talks to star in The Muppets 2 as an Interpol inspector. Other roles for the Europe-set caper comedy include a “Russian femme fatale and a male lead whose intentions are always in question.” There will also be a slew of cameo roles that need to be filled as well.

When The Muppets hits theaters the day before Thanksgiving the movie will be missing one of the original “Muppeteers”: Frank Oz.

Before becoming a director with films as diverse as the 1986 musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors and the DeNiro/Brando/Norton crime drama The Score to his credit, Oz provided the voices and movements for several of the most iconic Muppet characters including Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal as well as Grover and Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. He also did the voice and puppeteering for Yoda in the original Star Wars trilogy (for the prequels Oz only did the voice, as Yoda was now a CGI character).