Francesca Sloane interview: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ showrunner
For Francesca Sloane, tackling a television reboot of the 2005 action feature “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wasn’t the easiest of assignments for her first job as a television showrunner. She understood that no matter how fresh a take that she and co-creator Donald Glover gave it, there would be pushback and comparisons, much of it unfavorable. But in fact she relished the challenge. “Part of the draw and part of the mountain to climb was the original and those comparisons and allowing it to live in its own lane while still sort of bringing some of that traction over,” Sloane says of the eight-episode Prime Video drama series that stars Glover and Maya Erskine as secret agents posing as a married couple. The series became “a pairing of two people who are at odds and yet equally partnered in terms of their capabilities. We really wanted it to be about a marriage and what it means to become a Mrs. and Mrs.”
We spoke with Sloane as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV Showrunners Panel. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
In crafting the new series (which has been renewed for a second season) as a mashup of a relationship story and a spy thriller, Sloane and Glover reimagined the concept as two lonely people struggling to connect. “Not to turn too inward and become too personal and turn this into some kind of relationship session, but I think when we started working on this in 2020, we were able to tap into our own personal loneliness in telling this,” Sloane offers. “In 2020, I think a lot of people were really afraid and sort of leaning on their own individual sense of partnership and companionship if they were lucky enough to have that.”
When Sloane and Glover were brainstorming the arc for what would become the first eight episodes of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” they initially came up with something that was a little more similar to the Bradgelina movie that was closer to a seven-year itch moment “where cobwebs are sort of surrounding their chemistry. We invariably felt it made a lot more sense to bring two lonely people together and start them off from scratch. That’s when we decided to go with the meeting story…We realized there’s all sorts of things that happen when you become close to someone in terms of relationship tropes, along with all of the spy tropes you see in action movies And then we thought, how can you bring these two things together and still make sure it feels individual and fresh?”
There was an added pressure for Sloane in that because she’d never run a show before, she obsessed over every detail and wanting to make sure it all turned out perfectly when that’s naturally unrealistic. “I’m a big worrier,” she confirms. “I was aware just based on other jobs and producing other shows what a big mountain showrunning is to climb. I think I could never have imagined how many hats you actually wear when you’re really doing it, and also how much of it is really people managing.”
Adding to her stress was the fact Sloane became a first-time mother at exactly the same time as she started running “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” She became quickly aware that “a lot of those things genuinely overlap in the sense that you need to make sure that everyone is taken care of on an emotional level,” she finds. “At the same time, you need to make sure that budgets are being met. I was really blown away by the small things all the way to the largest things like, ‘Francesca, is this the toothbrush that you think John would use?’ And it really does matter because he’s such an aesthetic snob. All the way to, ‘Francesca, this might take us overbudget. How are we going to rewrite this so that doesn’t actually happen?’ And doing all of those things at the exact same time almost made my head explode. But I think at the end of the day, I was sort of excited by every single obstacle. It was a real exercise in figuring out how to problem-solve in a way that took care of everybody.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” streams on Amazon Prime Video.
