Donald Glover Spills On Phoebe Waller-Bridge Fallout Over ‘Mr. And Mrs. Smith’ Script

For Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s exit from “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” felt like “a divorce.”

The gifted writers initially joined fingers on rebooting the 2005 action-comedy film into an Amazon sequence however finally cut up on account of inventive variations. Whereas Waller-Bridge has been charmingly diplomatic in her causes, Glover is being a bit of extra candid in regards to the break.

“It’s a divorce in a weird way,” he informed The Hollywood Reporter in an interview revealed Wednesday. “You’re like, ‘Oh shit, 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,” Glover continued, including, “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.”

The approval for her sequence noticed Waller-Bridge employed for rewrites on the most recent “James Bond” movie, starring roles within the “Indiana Jones” franchise and an element reverse Glover in 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” After working collectively on “Solo,” Glover approached Waller-Bridge to star in and assist write the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” reboot.

The unique movie famously starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a married couple of competing assassins tasked with killing one another. In contrast to that duo — who arguably had a bit of an excessive amount of chemistry on the time — Glover and Waller-Bridge merely didn’t work out.

Waller-Bridge was initially solid in Jolie’s half; she was changed with Maya Erskine and fully eliminated as a co-writer, in keeping with IMDb credit for the sequence. Glover defined within the interview that the form of writers room tradition he created for his “Atlanta” sequence would possibly’ve thrown Waller-Bridge off.

“You weren’t afraid to say something — but we also had the right to roast you,” he mentioned. “It’s just how we got the laughs … 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.”

The previous co-stars had initially introduced the undertaking with enthusiastic Instagram posts, just for Waller-Bridge to exit in 2021. Glover revealed that her rewritten work had merely not been his “style,” however that he would’ve handed her the present if she wished it.

“I feel like Phoebe wasn’t fully in love with the thing,” he mentioned. “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.’”

Waller-Bridge herself spoke in regards to the causes for her exit final 12 months and, maybe most poignantly, echoed Glover’s sentiment that inventive collaboration is like “a marriage” — and that “sometimes marriages don’t work out.”

“I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it — still care about it,” she informed Vainness Honest in a 2023 interview. “And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.”