‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Team on Putting Ordinary People in Extraordinary Situations

Prime Video’s freshman spy series Mr. & Mrs. Smith is starting strong with 16 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama Actor and Actress for leads Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, and the prestigious Best Drama Series.

Reimagining the 2005 film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, co-creators Glover and showrunner Francesca Sloane aimed to make the show unique, rather than copy the original. Both Glover and Sloane are also nominated for Best Writing for a Drama Series.

Sloane was present with director and executive producer Hiro Murai, casting director Carmen Cuba, and composer David Fleming at Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees event.

“People keep saying that I coined this — this should go on record that Hiro coined this,” Sloane said. “Our season of Smiths are these C-minus students in an AP course. I think that sort of travels through the entire season as opposed to the film, which is a lot of fun, but it’s super glossy and stylized. We wanted our John and Jane to be your everyman. Anybody could look and relate to that. If it’s not you, it could be your neighbor, or it could secretly be your server or your mailman.”

She added, “So the two of them are in these situations that are super-high stakes but also becoming something that their relationship also then has to go through. It kind of makes them have to become closer and closer and closer, the more that they’re dealing with all this chaos with each other.”

Carmen Cuba, a six-time Emmy nominee with two wins, is nominated for Best Casting for a Drama Series for her work on Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Besides casting Glover and Erskine, she also helped the series earn additional nominations for guest stars Paul Dano, John Turturro, Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, and Parker Posey.

“It was always a collaboration, a conversation on how to match our tone — which is the Donald-Fran-Hiro tone — but to expand it into a bigger palette with this idea of this existing IP, and so it was a lot of talking,” Cuba said about her approach to casting. “It started with the Brad Pitt idea, right? So it’s like, ‘What people at that level would work here?’ And basically the conversations just went role by role, and it sort of told us what the piece wanted to be. To expand on what Hiro said, these are more ordinary people in these extraordinary situations. We realized that we wanted them to just be as iconic as Donald is in his space but for every role.”

Mr. & Mrs. Smith received a Season 2 renewal in May, with Sloane confirming that she and Glover are engrossed in the writers’ room, having the best time ever.

“We’re writing in like a witch’s cabin in a treehouse, which is the craziest vibes ever,” she said. “We’re literally skipping to work. We’re having so much fun — like, we can’t wait to be with each other and continue writing the show. We’re having a blast.”

Source: Deadline