In the heartbreaking final episode of Amazon Prime Video’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the climactic fight scene places our heroes in their own stunning brownstone. Surrounded by the trappings of wealth, the duo turns on each other, blowing up their house and ultimately their relationship… only to end their fight, sprawled out on the carpet, high on 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. ‘Yes, we have the water bar, we have all this fun stuff, [but] you’re still going to fight in it. It won’t make anything better. Being able to buy everything from Amazon isn’t going to solve your problems. So I like that. It felt like COVID again, where everyone 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?’”
After living together for months and pretending to be a married couple under the aliases “John” (Glover) and “Jane” (Maya Erskine), the secret spies, who spent most of the season jettisoned around the world and carried out nefarious acts for a shadow company were instructed to terminate each other. The assignment escalated into a deadly fight between a couple and gunplay, bombs and knives, culminating in a double dose of truth serum.
Erskine joined Glover and co-creator and showrunner Francesca Sloane to capture the final moments of the epic conclusion to “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” for Variety “Making a Scene,” presented by HBO.
Unlike his predecessors, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” sidesteps the typical spy tropes of outrageous sci-fi gadgets, elaborate disguises, and general spy tricks. Instead, the duo leans toward a less cinematic but more relatable idea: a realistic understanding of what makes (and doesn’t) make a marriage work. Even the idea behind the truth serum came directly from the showrunner’s couples counseling sessions.
“I went to couples therapy with my partner and the therapist said, ‘Maybe you two should sit down at sunset, do MDMA and remind each other that you love each other again,'” says Sloane. “It’s kind of like that idea, only in spy terms, where these two say, ‘Let’s all bear it, roll over Molly and find our way back to each other.’ Let’s go to a place that makes sense to us and get to reality.’”
The genesis of the truth serum was one of the ideas Sloane came up with early on with Glover while mapping out the series. The plot device easily connected the spy world to the relationship drama. “That was literally one of the first things we thought of, was that we wanted it to end the way it ended,” says Sloane.
“You sometimes wish you had truth serum in a relationship,” says Glover. “Let’s tear down all these walls. Because all that hassle takes time. You just have to get to know the person, and by the seventh year 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 coy all the time and we wanted an opportunity to just have them throw everything at the wall, be sweaty and horny and sad and just all at the same time, and finally to let the audience get some answers this way. There’s a trope that often appears in a lot of spy movies, which is actually really fun because there’s a campiness to it.”
She explains that the villain often tells an unnecessary monologue about their backstory.
“You don’t have to tell the people hanging on a rope that you’re going to feed to the sharks your whole life story about why you’re doing it,” she adds. “But we wanted to play with that in terms of relationships.”
David Lee/Prime Video
During the drug-induced confession, Jane feels most uncomfortable as she exposes it all.
“She really was like our James Bond,” says Sloane. ‘She’s the one with the biggest arc. Ultimately, she became an accidental hero towards the end, saving him again and again. [John] has a mother, he had a family. She really came with just a cat. [Jane] was the one who first experienced this level of love because John taught her in many ways.
Erskine was both “terrified” and excited to reveal Jane’s backstory that she knew all along.
“It was a challenge to keep that up for six months, but I think that’s why the scene was so great to do, because it terrified me,” she says. “I was terrified of it because you have to make 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’s sprawl also concerned Glover, who also directed the episode.
“I loved that Donald was really stressful while directing, we have to be exhausted by the end,” says Erskine. “In fights that you always see in movies, they can just fight all the time and look beautiful, but at the end of a fight you have no energy, and so she can barely fend him off, but so… It almost feels as the ultimate form of betrayal towards her at that moment. He forces her to tell the truth, and that’s the last thing she wants, but it’s what it takes to get to the next stage of their relationship.”
Glover believes his co-star was a huge help. “Because of directing, I thought, ‘I don’t know if this is good.’ I thought, ‘I’m fucked,'” he says. “I had a very difficult position, 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 Hilma af Klint’s swan painting, placed above the couple’s mantle on set.
“It’s these two swans entwined, which kind of represents a kind of spy versus spy, the yin and the yang, the woman and the man,” says Sloane. “They have that moment on the carpet where they become like swans, which is to say they finally start hugging and kissing again.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t the (stunning) costumes or even the dreamy ski chalet vacations that made “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” resonated with viewers, but the sweat-covered couple lay on the floor and laughed at each other’s facial expressions.
“I feel like we accept each other on the ground,” Glover says. “I love when she says, ‘Your nose is funny.’ I’m like, ‘Yes,’ we feel accepted. That’s what a real relationship is.”