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EXCLUSIVE: With the shocking Season 1 finale cliffhanger of Mr. & Mrs. Smith still reverberating, the hit Prime Video series is looking for new leads.
According to sources, Amazon MGM Studios is seeking an actor and actress in their 20s to play John and Jane, respectively, in Season 2. The roles are described as leads, requiring one-year deals. It is unclear whether formal offers have been made yet but A-list names, including Billie Eilish, have entered the rumor mill. (Two-time Oscar-winning musician Eilish made her acting debut in an episode of Glover’s previous Prime Video series, Swarm.)
Created by Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane, Season 1 of Mr. and Mrs. Smith followed two strangers (Glover, Maya Erskine) who are paired as a married couple as they both begin new careers as spies, taking on new aliases, John and Jane Smith.
The Season 1 finale, which Sloane described to Deadline as a “nod to a’ 70s cinema cliffhanger,” involved John and Jane getting into a gunfight, leaving it unclear whether the two survive.
Sloane, Glover, Erskine and Amazon bosses have deflected questions whether the two stars would be back, with Sloane saying, “If we tell you too much, you’ll know early if they survived.”
When asked in the same interview whether Mr. & Mrs. Smith may be taking the anthology series route with a different story and different characters each season in the vein of Fargo, which Sloane had worked on, she responded, succinctly, “maybe.”
That has been a rumored formula for Amazon’s take on the 2005 movie starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, with the one-year deals believed to be on the table for the new leads corroborating that scenario. (Glover and Erskine’s acting commitments are believed to have been for one season, too.)
Also supporting the anthology theory is the fact that the new Jane and John are said to be different characters, not replacements for the ones played by Glover and Erskine in Season 1. That means that Glover and Erskine could conceivably reprise their roles in some shape or form, whether their characters are dead or alive. (The setup of Mr. & Mrs. Smith makes things confusing with multiple Janes and Johns featured on the espionage-driven show.)
Whether it is Glover’s John, Erskine’s Jane or other character(s) carrying over, there should presumably be some continuity between seasons as Mr. & Mrs. Smith was entered as drama, not anthology series at the 2024 Emmys where it landed 16 nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actor/Actress In a Drama Series for Glover and Erskine, winning two trophies, including Guest Actress In A Drama Series for Michaela Coel.
Of course, that could also be part of the elaborate effort by the creative team to protect the integrity of the Season 1 cliffhanger. Anthology series are not obligated to be submitted as such and, while rare, they have competed as dramas, most notably Season 1 of HBO’s True Detective.
Whatever the exact Season 2 plan is, “I think audiences will get everything they want when they come back,” Amazon MGM Studios head Jennifer Salke told Deadline in July.
