Donald Glover and Maya Erskine depict a wedded pair in the fresh Amazon Prime spy series Mr. & Mrs. Smith. However, this wasn’t initially the setup!
Before the 36-year-old PEN15 creator took on the role as Glover’s counterpart, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was initially cast for the part.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter released on Wednesday, Glover, aged 40, elaborated on why the Fleabag star was substituted.
When questioned about why he believed that he and Waller-Bridge, aged 38, wouldn’t seamlessly gel as co-creators and co-stars of the show, he pointed to their close friendship. “I think because we were friends and I liked Phoebe,” Glover said.
“It’s a divorce weirdly,” he continued. “You’re like, ‘Oh s—, this should have worked.’ And this is just me, being honest, but I think a good relationship is one where you don’t waver from the extremely uncomfortable. And I don’t know if we were ever going to get to a place where we could be completely brutal to each other.”
The former Community star drew parallels between collaborating on Mr. & Mrs. Smith with Waller-Bridge and working with other creators on his FX comedy-drama series Atlanta.
“I don’t know. It might’ve just been cultural,” he said. “You’ve got to think, Fleabag was written entirely by her, they don’t do writers’ rooms in the U.K. And I look back at Atlanta, and we built a culture where we could say mean things to each other or be like, ‘That idea is kind of [crap],’ and then we’d laugh. You weren’t afraid to say something — but we also had the right to roast you. It’s just how we got the laughs.”
Glover felt he could never envision himself being brutally honest with Waller-Bridge in the manner he had been with others.
For her, the lesser load was fine because “I had just gotten off years of that [with PEN15].” Glover did note that his split with Waller-Bridge was tough because “we both put a lot of work into it.”
“We both were working hard. So, who gets to keep the cat?” he quipped, before saying he would have let her have the project if she genuinely loved it more than he did.
Amazon Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith is adapted from the 2005 film of the identical title, featuring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as the protagonists. In the new series, Glover and Erskine portray married assassins employed by a secretive spy organization.
