Reflecting on her six months working on the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith show and her partnership with Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge said last year that “some marriages don’t work out.” Apparently, that’s the metaphor everyone’s running with, as Glover agreed in a new profile for The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a divorce in a weird way. You’re like, ‘Oh shit, this should have worked,’” Glover explains. “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.”
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As to how the creative breakup actually went down, “It’s like a real divorce where the hardest part is knowing when to say it’s over. Like, when do you quit?” Glover said. “Because you want to be cool, like, ‘Oh it’s over, that’s fine.’ But we both put a lot of work into it. We both were working really hard. So, who gets to keep the cat?”
Glover chalks it up to different styles from two different television auteurs, noting that Waller-Bridge wrote Fleabag by herself while Atlanta had a writing staff—though elsewhere in the interview he admits he often believes “my idea of what is cool is a better road for everybody.” With that kind of attitude coming from possibly both sides, it’s no wonder there was a creative divorce: “That’s what happens when you’re two captains,” Glover observes. “It’s like, ‘This is how I run my ship.’ ‘Well, this is how I run my ship.’ And it’s such a big idea, this show, I don’t think it can have two captains.”
Custody of Mr. & Mrs. Smith obviously went to Glover in the divorce, though claims he would’ve handed it over if she wanted it: “I feel like Phoebe wasn’t fully in love with the thing.” (“I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it—still care about it,” Waller-Bridge said in August 2023.) Glover says Waller-Bridge’s version of the pilot wasn’t “his style,” but “if she’d done it with her in it, we’d all be like, ‘This is a great fucking show.’”
But there is still some of Waller-Bridge’s signature in Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s DNA, as showrunner Francesca SloaneThe A.V. Club. Maya Erskine, who was brought on to replace Waller-Bridge, said she noticed that “There were some lines that were left [in the script] that I could just feel were Phoebe.” Glover confirms that Erskine had a sixth sense for the ghost of his creative ex: “It was so crazy, Fran would always be like, ‘She’s right. That was Phoebe’s line.’” It’s like Stevie Nicks once said, you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman who co-created an Amazon Prime Video show with you. Or something like that!