After Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge fell out, Maya Erskine was cast in the lead position of Mr. & Mrs. Smith instead of Glover. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, February, the actor explained Waller-Bridger’s departure as “a divorce in a weird way.’You’re like, ‘Oh sh-t, this should have worked.’”
Glover admitted that, in retrospect, his relationship with Waller-Bridge wasn’t quite as cozy as he believed it might have been. “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,” he admitted.
Before Waller-Bridge abruptly discontinued the show in September 2021, the two were originally scheduled to co-star in the Prime Video drama. In an interview with THR, the Atlanta actor said that the couple finally decided against collaborating for several circumstances.
Glover mentioned that during the filming process, they didn’t feel as comfortable as they anticipated and their distinct personalities didn’t work well together. “I don’t think we ever felt comfortable enough with each other. And that’s OK,” he said. “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.”
Glover concluded by pointing out that, similar to genuine relationships, things accumulated over time, and the performers had to make the difficult choice to end their on-screen careers.
“It’s like a real divorce where the hardest part is knowing when to say it’s over,” he said. “Like, when do you quit? 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 claimed that the couple’s final choice to part ways was professional and that his enthusiasm for the project was what kept him on the series instead of Waller-Bridge. He remarked to the newspaper, “I feel like Phoebe wasn’t fully in love with the thing, But I feel really good about the fact that if the thing was feeling more like hers and she was like, ‘I just love this,’ I would have been like, ‘You should have it.’”