How ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Flips the Spy Genre Script: ‘It’s a Romance Show,’ Says Donald Glover (2024)

“I really liked spy shows as a kid. I watched every single one. I watched ‘Get Smart,’ ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ – any spy thing I would watch,” recalled Donald Glover at a recent FYC conversation for “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

Glover, who drew upon that deep fondness for the espionage genre when reconceiving the concept for the Prime TV series with co-star Maya Erskine and showrunner and co-creator Francesca Sloane, said the trickiest part of the mission was marrying the fantastical tropes of the spy trade to the oh-so-real ins and outs of romantic relationships.

“We were like, ‘People kind of know what these things are, that the formula for them is very easy: You kind of know what James Bond’s going to have,” he recounted. “How do we make it not feel that way?’ We were like, ‘It’s not a spy show with romance on it; it’s a romance show with spy on it.’”

Striking a balance between moving, painfully recognizable relationship dynamics and the thrill-ride spy action was incredibly challenging, Glover confessed, but the production and post-production teams stepped up to deliver a seamless tonal tightrope walk, deftly juxtaposing the intimate drama opposite the epic-scale set pieces. “They did such a great job of helping us find out ‘where is the line?’” said the star, co-creator and executive producer.

Sloane marveled at the intense commitment Glover, who was centerstage as well as overseeing the project’s creative direction, and Erskine, who’d recently had a baby and threw herself into prepping for the show’s physical demands, dedicated to creating their characters’ rapport, especially because they rarely appear in scenes without the other. “The two of them worked so hard, endlessly,” she shared. “We all lost our minds, but they did such an incredible job, and they gave so much.”

Sloane, too, gave her all to the production. “She had just had a baby herself and was showrunning this show,” said Erskine. “This is a massive production – I mean, huge! And she was the boss of everyone and kept her composure. … It’s just such an insane amount of work to put on one person, and she really just led us with such grace.”

The team had little idea just how daunting an undertaking they’d embarked on. “We’re all kind of indie theater kids and we were like, ‘We’re going to write a little thing,’” laughed Glover. “There was a learning curve like, ‘They gave us a hundred mil to do this sh*t? What?’ And then we had to show up. And everybody had just had a big transition of either having kids or just got married.”

Now, Sloane said that watching what they achieved onscreen took “my breath away – that it’s little ole us on a huge landscape… It’s wild!” Even with a crack stunt team having their backs, the actors couldn’t resist jumping into action if given a chance – and even when they weren’t expected to. “Maya was supposed to get off a snowmobile and let Tara, her double, do that [stunt], and Maya took off on the snowmobile. We’re like, ‘Oh sh*t! Keep rolling, just keep rolling!’”

“I was out of control,” Erskine chuckled.

Subtler metaphors resonated with Glover as much as splashy stunts, like the sequences that required the Smiths to trust each other with their geographic locations – and, in turn, their lives. “This episode’s about giving your location to your significant other… like ‘You can know my passcode because I have nothing to hide’ kind of thing, which I love,” he said. “It’s the ‘spy sandwich,’ which Fran coined: the normal the spy, and then the normal layer of this is all it is.”

Ingenuity abounded on set: Director of photography Christian Sprenger devised a method of camera placement to cut the time to shoot a key, dialogue-driven dinner table sequence between the Smiths and their frenemy opposite numbers (played by Parker Posey and Wagner Moura) in half, allowing the actors to keep their banter fresh and energetic, without dozens of takes.

“[Christian] was like, ‘Just hang – It’s a real hang,’” remembered Glover of his direction, which allowed them to better connect with the guest actors. “[We’re] really huge fans of both of them. So we’re sitting there like, ‘What do you guys think about everything?’…So it really played to our advantage.”

Ultimately, it was exposing exactly who the characters were at the core that proved the most rewarding for the cast and crew, such as Jane’s method for emotional survival. “She lost her mom when she was young; she has no relationship with her father,” explained Erskine. “Her cat is her only source of family, of connection. And so for her, putting all her energy into career and success is her way of ‘that’s how I’ll achieve happiness, or at least I’ll achieve something.’ And so when there’s another person presented to her, it just scares the sh*t out of her. As soon as she opens up, then she can lose something… That’s just a huge fear and that’s where she acts from.”

Glover zeroed in on “John’s needing people to make sense of himself. He needs purpose. And her being so standoffish at the beginning, it’s like, ‘What am I doing here?’ You can see his kind of anxiety creep up, which is why he’s always trying to stand out or be something.”

Sloane said that because the creative team was of the same generation, “We almost accidentally ended up writing this thing about what our parents did to us and where we ended up in this place of real confusion and loss, of wanting to make something of ourselves and not quite understanding how to do that.

“James Bond does these things for the love of his country. Why are these two doing this?” she posed. “It is for profound loneliness, profound loss of identity and a profound sense of not knowing who they are or wanting to be somebody. That’s why these two sign up for this, and that’s why these two fall for each other, ultimately because it is about identity and about not knowing what that is.”