The 2005 action comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith may be most notable as the project that sparked the romance between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (aka “Brangelina”), but the film was a box office success and remains something of a sleeper cult hit, thanks to an inventive premise and, of course, the breezy chemistry of its stars. Fast forward to the present, and Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane — creator and producer of Atlanta, respectively — are debuting a new twist on the story in a Prime Video series.
Glover stars alongside Maya Erskine (PEN15, Blue Eye Samurai) in this new version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which slightly reworks the idea from the 2005 film to be about a pair of strangers who begin working for a shadowy spy agency undercover as a married couple (as opposed to a married couple who don’t realize they are both spies).
Ahead of the series premiere on February 2, Glover and Erskine sat down to go in-depth on how they created their characters and established a believable chemistry to become Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
On believable chemistry between their characters:
Maya Erskine: To believably create chemistry, I mean, it was a lot of work. A lot of work on our own. I had a journal about Donald and did dream analysis.
Donald Glover: Dream therapy.
Erskine: No, I mean it was very easy. I felt like he was… You were one of my friends from college. I know you don’t think I’m cool enough to be your friend.
Glover: I don’t know. I just don’t know. [laughs] No, I feel the same way. I feel like I’ve known Maya way longer than we’ve actually known each other. It’s very strange.
(Photo by David Lee/Prime Video)
Erskine: But it mirrored real life in that the order in which we shot everything was the pilot and then the second episode, so it is a meet cute. So we were really getting to know each other in the beginning, and then I feel like our chemistry got even stronger and grew as we filmed, because we just got closer.
Glover: And we just knew each other at that point, yeah.
Watch the video for the full interview with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith: Season 1
(2024)
premieres on Prime Video on February 2, 2024.
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