In 2021, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was attached to a TV reboot of the 2005 action-comedy flick Mr. & Mrs. Smith along with Donald Glover. It sounded like a dream team of sorts, but Waller-Bridge exited the series shortly after and was replaced by Maya Erskine. Still, we never got the full story of what went down between the two of them.
The reboot premiered last week on Amazon Prime, and now Glover is opening up about Waller-Bridge’s original involvement in the project. “It’s a divorce in a weird way,” Glover told The Hollywood Reporter. “You’re like, ‘Oh sh*t, 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,” he added.
While that might sound rough, Glover explained that the writer’s room on shows like Atlanta was a lot different than what Waller-Bridge was used to. “It might’ve just been cultural. You’ve got to think, Fleabag was written entirely by her, they don’t really 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,” he explained.
Glover continued, “I don’t think we ever felt comfortable enough with each other. And that’s OK. That’s what happens when you’re two captains. It’s like, ‘This is how I run my ship.’ ‘Well, this is how I run my ship.'” He said, adding that the two of them had different ideas for the direction of the show. “And it’s such a big idea, this show, I don’t think it can have two captains. I mean, she rewrote the pilot, and I saw her script and I was like, ‘It’s definitely not my style,’ but if she’d done it with her in it, we’d all be like, ‘This is a great f***ing show.'”
Last year, Waller-Bridge expressed disappointment in how it all went down. “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it — still care about it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter last summer. “You don’t want to get in the way of a vision. Creative collaboration is like a marriage, and some marriages don’t work out.”
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
