‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Showrunner Francesca Sloane on Mining Marriage for Maximum Drama (and Laughs)
When it was announced in early 2021 that “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the 2005 blockbuster action romance with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing the titular spies, was being adapted into a television series for Prime Video, the response was mixed at best. Why would anyone attempt to resurrect a successful property partially fueled by salacious tabloid fodder surrounding Pitt and Jolie’s real-life affair — let alone try to re-create their chemistry onscreen and reimagine a new take?
The initial doubts over the TV version of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” even with co-creator, writer, director and star Donald Glover in the driver’s seat, fired up the creative team behind the scenes. It was time to prove everyone wrong. “Maybe this is the naughty kid in me, maybe this is the punk in me — it excited me because they had no idea what we were cooking,” co-creator and showrunner Francesca Sloane said.
The recipe they masterminded was a modern twist on the film, which earned $487 million at the box office worldwide. Instead of mirroring the movie, which centered on two married spies secretly working for rival agencies who discover they’re contracted to kill each other, Glover and Sloane — who were creative partners on FX’s dark comedy “Atlanta” — agreed there was more value and narrative juice if the heroes knew what they were getting into from the start with a shifted focus on an everyday marriage.
“When he initially called me to do a ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ television series, I thought maybe he was kidding around, only because Donald has a very odd sense of humor,” Sloane said. “The idea of the writers of ‘Atlanta’ taking on this Brad and Angelina blockbuster hit, it felt like a strange choice for us. We started talking about taking the idea of this big, glossy action show and focusing instead on the relationship, these characters and why they came to this [job] in the first place: utter loneliness in addition to having dreams of making something of themselves.”
The risk paid off. “Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s” eight-episode first season, which earned 16 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and seven acting nods, follows unassuming assassins John (Glover) and Jane Smith (Maya Erskine), who are hired by an enigmatic company with unclear intentions to pose as a married couple. Their point of contact, known only by name as “Hihi,” puppeteers their every move through cryptic messages as John and Jane carry out dangerous missions while meeting nefarious oddball personalities (and managing a faux marriage in its infancy stage).
“We were doing something that was a totally different take,” Sloane recalled. “It made me excited because people might not love it, but we were doing something that makes sense to us — and people are going to be surprised.”
Much of the series’ success rested on the shoulders of Glover and Erskine, who weren’t obvious choices to lead an action-heavy romance. Primarily known for work with a comedic bent, the outside-the-box castings, coupled with the fact that Glover and Erskine “represented the everyman,” was precisely what made the pairing intriguing and different, Sloane said. “Once we started seeing the chemistry between Donald and Maya as they became closer and closer — their friendship was so tangible and so contagious — I started doing some rewriting on set.”
“Seeing how they laughed and how they made each other laugh, that unlocked something for me. This is their level of sexiness,” she said. “Sexy for Donald and Maya is actually the two of them cracking each other up, teasing each other and making each other laugh to the point of tears. We upheld that dynamic between them and kept going back to that as a returning point of warmth.”
Because of the show’s specificity in tone, there was “a lot of recalibrating and reconfiguring [of] things — a lot of discussions,” Sloane said. One of the first changes was incorporating race and identity into the characters’ backstories, and how that informed their decisions and the way in which they moved about the world. It added a layer of depth that wouldn’t have otherwise existed had they gone a different casting route, she suggested: “They used that as their superpower.”
It wasn’t until the fourth episode, “Double Date,” where Sloane felt confident that what they were doing was working. In the closing scene, John and Jane say “I love you” to each other for the first time while laying in bed following a catastrophic mission initiated by another John and Jane Smith played by Wagner Moura and Parker Posey. “When you watch that scene, you can feel a real relationship [developing] between these two people and it becomes such a specific and quiet moment — and yet, it’s so universal. That was a shining moment for me where I thought, ‘We might actually have something here, guys. This might be doing the thing that we hope it does.’”
If there’s an episode that best represented “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the jam-packed, fight-intense finale is at the top of the list for Sloane, who co-wrote the episode with Glover. By that point in the journey, John and Jane are already on opposing sides, dead set on ruining each other’s lives as they seek to permanently eliminate the other from the picture. “We always knew that by the time we got to the end we wanted to [echo] the actual movie, but we wanted to do it our way. We wanted to have earned it,” Sloane said, adding that it was the most “exhausting” episode to make. “All of the things came together where we got to just do the damn thing. There’s something very satisfying about that.”
Chatter around “Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s” open-ended cliff-hanger, which raised more questions than answers about John and Jane’s fates, grew as interest in a second season increased. Sloane and Glover took inspiration from the vague endings of “The Graduate” (happily ever after?) and “The Sopranos” (did he die?), putting the onus on viewers to reach their own conclusions about what ultimately happened. “We didn’t know if we would have a Season 2,” Sloane said. “We also didn’t know if we would want one.” Because of that, it was vital to have “an ending that would be satisfying to Donald and me if it was just one story and it ended that way.”
Queries about Glover and Erskine’s potential return spiked once Prime Video greenlit another installment in May. Sloane has consistently skirted the question, remaining coy even though she understands why it’s a popular point of conversation.
“I’m touched that people are so attached to these characters. I wasn’t expecting that; I don’t think Donald and Maya were expecting that,” she said, opting once again not to confirm whether Glover or Erskine will have an onscreen presence in Season 2. “The last way we would want to let the world know whether these two have survived or not is us saying something in a conversation like this. It’d be much more satisfying as artists and to viewers to be able to watch it unfold in a Season 2 one way or another. That’s the reason we’re being so cagey about it, I guess. We just want to give you guys a good thing.”
Work is already underway on Season 2 with the writers’ room operating out of a “bizarre little cabin” in Los Angeles. Sloane revealed they have “a whole idea” mapped out that they’re excited about bringing to life for the next chapter in the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” saga. “I feel like such a nerd,” she said. “I’m skipping to work everyday and I can’t wait to be with these writers and talk about the direction in which we’re going because we’re having such a blast. I hope it translates into being a great season of television if we’re having that much fun already in the room.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama Series issue here.
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