.....Glover did eventually watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith, mostly out of curiosity. “And then I hit my brother up and was like, ‘What the **** is this?’ ” he recalls. His brother, Stephen, who’s written with him on both Atlanta and Swarm, told him he was simply watching it wrong. “He’s like, ‘It’s a good date movie. Who cares if they did it well?’ Everybody gets to pretend to be Brad or Angelina, and you go home holding hands like, ‘We’re not a bad team.’ And he’s right.” But what if there were another way, he wondered. He enlisted Francesca “Fran” Sloane, a writer on Atlanta, and they reconceived it as a romance drama that masquerades as a spy series. Their Smiths would be thrust together — given a marriage license, a Manhattan brownstone and strict orders to not #### up....
Initially, Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge — who’d co-starred with Glover in Solo: A Star Wars Film — was attached to co-write and star. But that didn’t work out, so they recast her role with PEN15 creator-star Maya Erskine. She and Glover had never even met, but both got their start at NYU’s Tisch School (Glover, 40, a few years ahead of 36-year-old Erskine). Now, nearly two years later, their eight-episode first season has dropped on Amazon Prime Video, featuring a dizzying array of impressive guest stars .... and the kind of travel budget that would make any bookkeeper sweat.
GLOVER Absolutely. I mean, as a man, it’s going to be different, what’s expected of me. But with the film, it’s like, who can’t fall in love with Angelina and Brad? With our show, you have to be vulnerable enough to have people ask the question, like, “Can I be loved? Can I be accepted?” And I’m shirtless in this ****, and I’m not ******* Brad Pitt. .... I think what happened was, well, number one, I didn’t know what I was getting out of it. I felt like I knew what she was getting out of it, and I didn’t feel like she was being honest, necessarily, about what she was getting out of it. I was thinking about it in such a silly way, which I see now. Now I realize, yeah, maybe she’s gaining some stuff, but she’s also losing a lot of stuff. And we eventually had an honest talk and she was like, “I’m a traditional woman.” And when she said that, some part of me was like, “And I want to help you be that.” Whatever she needs me to be, that makes me happy. Especially nowadays, finding trust is so hard, and the fact that we have this and that we can even argue about it and still be like, “But I love you” — I mean, how many people have that?
ERSKINE There’s something really nice about choosing to stay with the one that you’ve chosen and keep growing. And the other thing is, we both had kids before getting married. And to me, that’s the big union. I mean, we’re together for life, no matter what. But then I got married last year, and I remember it feeling incredibly serious in the best way.
GLOVER It’s a very romantic thing to be like, “Oh, I can be your knight in shining armor and you’re letting me, you’re being vulnerable for me.” And we just kept talking about those kinds of things on this show because we were all getting married.... It’s funny, in the Atlanta writers room, we were all anti-marriage.
(You sent a file of your trauma? )
ERSKINE It was more like, “If you have any anecdotes or things you want to infuse in Jane, here’s a couple of scripts to see what there is.” I sent so many pages.
GLOVER But she’s good at that, obviously. You watch PEN15.
ERSKINE But it’s also harder when it isn’t just you — when it includes your partner, you have to figure out the boundaries.
(Before Maya was attached to this show, her role was supposed to be played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was going to co-create. Maya, you’re a creator, too, but you chose not to write here …You rarely see two auteurs collaborate. At what point did it become clear that it wasn’t going to work with Waller-Bridge? )
GLOVER I think because we were friends and I really liked Phoebe and we’d worked together … It’s a divorce in a weird way. You’re like, “Oh ####, this should have worked.” 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. ....I don’t know. It might’ve just been cultural. You’ve got to think, Fleabag was written entirely by her, they don’t really do writers rooms in the U.K. And I look back at Atlanta, and we built a culture where we could say mean things to each other or be like, “That idea is kind of [crap],” and then we’d laugh. You weren’t afraid to say something — but we also had the right to roast you. It’s just how we got the laughs.
ERSKINE But that’s not every writers room.
GLOVER You’re right. It was special.
(And you never got to that place with Waller-Bridge?)
GLOVER I don’t think we ever felt comfortable enough with each other. And that’s OK. That’s what happens when you’re two captains. 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. I mean, she rewrote the pilot, and I saw her script and I was like, “It’s definitely not my style,” but if she’d done it with her in it, we’d all be like, “This is a great ####ing show.”
