Yahoo News Donald Glover, Maya Erskine See Romantic Sparks, Bullets Fly in ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Remake Trailer
Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as two lonely strangers get to grips with undercover marriage and dangerous espionage in the latest trailer for Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith series, a reboot of the 2005 New Regency film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
“They didn’t bring up [that] we’d be pairing until the last interview,” Glover, as John Smith, tells a frosty Jane Smith (Erskine) early on in the trailer. “It’s an old KGB tactic,” she replies awkwardly as the enemies-to-lovers rom-com trope kicks off.
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Soon enough, romantic sparks and bullets aplenty fly in the teaser that has Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Smith, now hitched as part of a mysterious spy agency, navigating complicated and real feelings for one another. It’s that combination of drama, action and romance in the Mr. & Mrs. Smith remake that viewers may recall from the 2005 movie of the same name.
The original Mr. & Mrs. Smith grossed $487 million worldwide, underscoring Prime Video’s interest in the remake. The difference in the Prime Video series is that Glover and Erskine’s characters pose as married for their spy agency gig amid endless gunfights, explosions and chase scenes, while the 2005 movie had Pitt and Jolie’s characters playing a couple in a stagnating marriage that discover one another’s real jobs as assassins in rival agencies, which revives their marriage (and famously led to their real-life coupling).
Glover and Francesca Sloane, who worked together on Atlanta, are co-creators and executive producers of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, with Sloane (whose credits also include Fargo and Hulu’s The First) serving as showrunner.
In a letter to press about the series, Sloane explained how their TV take will be different. “Once we were announced, we saw the comment, ‘Who needs this show?’ We didn’t blame them. In a culture heavily inundated with remakes, this was a reasonable reaction,” she noted. “No one would need a show that retold the same blockbuster movie. But what we set out to do was to make something wholly original. This show is about a relationship, it’s about being clumsy humans. It’s about being relatable. John and Jane are offered the chance of a lifetime, whole new identities, an opportunity to be super spies. Metaphorically, though, they are C- students being thrown into an AP course.”
All eight episodes of the season are set to premiere Feb. 2 on Prime Video.
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