Francesca Sloane, writer and co-creator of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, worked with Donald Glover to reinterpret the 2005 film of the same name into a dark dramedy about two for-hire agents embroiled in a tumultuous fake marriage. Sloane selected this scene from episode six, “Couples Therapy,” where John and Jane Smith (Glover and Maya Erskine) break into a scathing fight while on a spy mission in the woods, and tensions that have been simmering over the course of the season come to a head.
“It’s probably the most raw scene between them,” Francesca Sloane tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s definitely the moment where they get the ugliest with each other. It’s a breaking point.” The argument begins when Jane is noting that a bug, which has been attracted to the light of their campfire, has flown to its demise. “It’s sort of this passing thought,” adds Sloane. “And he catches [it], and he questions her and asks her what she’s talking about. He starts to tell her, basically, ‘You’re being too negative.’ ”
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Instead of receiving John’s comment as a put-down, Jane tries to steer the conversation to a book the two had talked about early in their relationship, and the concepts discussed in it. “Unfortunately, in that moment, she then realizes that this thing that she thought was the shared commonality between them [doesn’t exist] — John clearly never read the book because when she references it, it goes way over his head,” explains Sloane. “So all it does is add fuel to the flame, and that kind of kicks everything off.”
Episode six is uniquely structured in that it cuts between the action unfolding in the woods and couples therapy sessions. But this was not always the case: “The episode used to take place entirely in the woods,” explains Sloane. While the writers loved the drawn-out arboreal argument showing a couple reaching their boiling point, they realized an hour of that made for unpleasant viewing. “We started to think in a way that made sense for production, but [also] creatively, where we could have these moments showing this relationship disintegrating while keeping a level of comedy.”
To flush out the flow of the fight, the writers asked themselves, ” ‘What would really cut? What would really make it feel like John would explode?’ We created a song of how we could get to this journey, to make John finally turn into a firework,” says Sloane. The fight ends with Jane asking John about his emergency contact, which proved a touchstone for Sloane. “The one thing that was my North Star is that after we see John have this big explosion, I wanted to make sure we had a moment of Jane expressing, ‘Who is your emergency contact?’ ”
Sloane reconsidered the subtext of their source material in putting together this moment. “The film is secretly deeper than I realized. It really is about a marriage,” she says. “What we wanted to reflect on, far more than the action of it all, [was] the actual relationship. One of the things that makes a relationship stay strong is when two people can be vulnerable and honest. But in tandem, the thing that makes you a really good spy is to be a really fantastic liar.”
Rewrites happened on location at Harriman State Park, where Sloane, Glover, Erskine and the episode’s director, Amy Seimetz, convened in a trailer to work out the beats of this brutal argument. “We were all in the woods shooting this episode, so everybody was cranky, cold and wet, and bringing a bunch of New Yorkers to the woods, away from their cappuccinos, we were all very miserable. I was a new mom while shooting this show, and I schlepped my family, while I was breastfeeding, to do this. It was very difficult.”
Sloane references The Prophet (by Kahlil Gibran) because she and Glover had a personal connection to the philosophy book. “We both have had really romantic anecdotes associated with it, and Donald’s now wife, Nish, once had Donald lie on her lap, and they read that book to each other in a park,” she explains. “It was sort of the first moment where they realized they were falling for one another. That’s why we chose that book.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
