In the heart-pounding final episode of Amazon Prime Video’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the climatic fight scene corners our heroes in their own, stunning brownstone. Surrounded by the trappings of wealth, the duo turn on each other, blowing up their home and ultimately, their relationship… only to end their fight sprawled out on the carpet, high off truth serum, sweating, kissing and baring their souls to each other.
“It was very poetic that we destroyed everything because it felt very millennial,” explains co-creator and star Donald Glover. “Yeah, we got the water bar, we got all this nice stuff, [but] you’re still going to fight in it. It’s not going to make anything nicer. Being able to buy everything from Amazon is not going to fix your problems. So, I love that. It felt like COVID again where everybody had to spend that year or two indoors saying, ‘I made a lot of decisions on the fly and now I have to sit with them. Are these the right decisions?’”
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After months of cohabitating together pretending to be a married couple under the aliases “John” (Glover) and “Jane” (Maya Erskine), the secret spies, who spent the better part of the season jettisoning around the world performing nefarious deeds for a shadow corporation, found themselves with the instructions to terminate each other. The assignment escalated into a deadly couple’s fight involving shootouts, bombs and knives culminating in a double dose of truth serum.
Erskine joined Glover and co-creator and showrunner Francesca Sloane to break down the last moments of the epic conclusion of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” for Variety’s “Making a Scene,” presented by HBO.
Unlike its predecessors, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” sidesteps the typical espionage tropes of excessive sci-fi gadgets, elaborate disguises and overall spy shtick. Instead, the duo leans into a less cinematic but more relatable idea: a real-life understanding of what does (and doesn’t) make a marriage work. Even the idea behind the truth serum came straight out of the showrunner’s couples counseling sessions.
“I had experienced couples therapy with my spouse and the therapist was like, ‘Maybe you two need to sit at sunset, do MDMA and remind each other of how you love each other again,’” says Sloane. “It’s sort of like that idea, just in spy terms with these two being like, ‘Let’s just bear it all, roll on Molly and find our way back to each other again. Let’s just get to someplace that makes sense to us and get to the real of it all.’”
The genesis of the truth serum was one of the ideas Sloane concocted early on with Glover while mapping out the series. The plot device easily connected the spy world to the relationship drama. “That literally was one of the first things we came up with was wanting it to end the way that it ended,” says Sloane.
“You do kind of wish you had truth serum in a relationship sometimes,” Glover says. “Let’s just tear down all these walls. Because all that stuff takes time. You just got to get to know the person, and by year seven it’s like you don’t need truth serum anymore. But that’s a long time and a lot of hard work.”
Adds Sloane, “Also, the characters, John and Jane, are so withholding the entire time and we wanted an opportunity to just let them fully throw everything at the wall, be sweaty and horny and sad and just all at once, and finally let the audience get some answers in this way. There’s a trope a lot of times in a lot of spy films, which is actually a lot of fun because there’s a campiness to it.”
She explains that many times, the villain shares an unnecessary monologue about their backstory.
“You don’t have to tell the people who are hanging by a rope that you’re about to feed to sharks your entire life story as to why you’re doing it,” she adds. “But we wanted to play with that in terms of relationships.”
During the drug-fueled confession, Jane is the most uncomfortable baring it all.
“She really was sort of our James Bond,” says Sloane. “She’s the one that had the biggest arc. She ended up being an accidental hero by the end of it, kind of saving him time and time again. [John] has a mom, he had a family. She really came with just a cat. [Jane] was the one who, for the first time, was experiencing this level of love by way of John teaching her that in a lot of ways.”
Erskine was both “terrified” and also excited to reveal Jane’s backstory that she’d known all along.
“Holding that in for six months was challenging, but I think that’s why the scene was so great to do because it scared the shit out of me,” she says. “I was terrified of it because you do have to kind of take big swings and you don’t want to play everything the same. It felt cathartic to do and also terrifying.”
The tone of the carpet sprawl also worried Glover, who directed the episode too.
“I loved that Donald, when directing, was really stressing, we need to be exhausted by the end of this,” says Erskine. “In fights you always see in movies, they’re just able to fight the whole time and look gorgeous, but at the end of a fight you have no energy, and so she can barely fight him off, but so… It almost feels like the ultimate form of betrayal to her in that moment. He is making her tell the truth, and that’s the last thing that she wants, but it’s what is necessary for them to get to the next stage of their relationship.”
Glover feels his co-star was a huge help. “Because of directing, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is good.’ I was like, ‘I’m fucked,’” he says. “I had a really hard point of view, but because she was so dialed in, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just follow Maya’s lead.’ She killed that scene.”
The moment also channeled the swan painting by Hilma af Klint, placed above the couple’s mantle on set.
“It’s these two entangled swans, which really represents sort of spy vs. spy, the yin and the yang, the woman and the man,” says Sloane. “They have that moment on the carpet where they’re sort of becoming those swans, which is, they start to finally embrace again and kiss.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t the (stunning) costumes or even the dreamy ski chalet vacations that made “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” resonate with viewers, but rather the sweat-covered couple splayed out on the floor laughing at each other’s facial expressions.
“I feel like that part on the ground is when we accept each other,” says Glover. “I love when she’s like, ‘Your nose is weird.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ We feel accepted. That’s what a real relationship kind of is.”
