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Donald Glover and Maya Erskine aren’t returning for season 2 of Prime Video‘s Mr. & Mrs. Smith?! What? Is this some sort of contract negotiation standoff? Even after the series’ 16 Emmy nominations including Lead Actor and Lead Actress in a drama?
Hardly, according to co-Creator and EP Francesca Sloane and the show’s director and EP Hiro Murai.
“We’re just trying to make the best version of season 2 possible,” Sloane tells Crew Call, “That’s why we’re being so coy about it.” That is whether Glover and Erskine are really not returning.
Well, then is the gist of future Mr. & Mrs. Smith seasons to be like an anthology series ala Fargo? Sloane was a producer on that Noah Hawley created series. “Maybe,” she tells us.
“We wanted the ending to leave on this nod to a’ 70s cinema cliffhanger,” Sloane says, “If we tell you too much, you’ll know early if they survived.”
The duo talk about their series adaptation of the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt 2005 near half billion grossing blockbuster and putting their own spin on it. Yes, the show’s intention about their fake married spy life comes into its own by the end of episode one “First Date” which landed Sloane and Glover a Drama Series Writing Emmy and Murai a Directing Drama Series Emmy nod.
But when Sloane received the IP from Glover, “I thought of it in this tiny, tiny, small intimate way,” she says. “It was exiting to think about the quiet moments in between the action.”
For Murai, who won a 2023 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series for The Bear, his inspiration for Mr. & Mrs. Smith was the quiet and deliberately paced Japanese reality series Terrace House, while for Sloane, it was movies like Elaine May’s Mikey & Nicky in which it’s “a night that keeps going and going; gosh if I can tell a 3-hour version of an episode that lasts too long.”
She adds, “This is the closest version of trying to do something like that.”
Our conversation with the duo is below:
