“I really liked spy shows as a kid. I watched every single one. I watched ‘Get Smart,’ ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ – any spy thing I would watch,” recalled Donald Glover at a recent FYC conversation for “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”
Glover, who drew upon that deep fondness for the espionage genre when reconceiving the concept for the Prime TV series with co-star Maya Erskine and showrunner and co-creator Francesca Sloane, said the trickiest part of the mission was marrying the fantastical tropes of the spy trade to the oh-so-real ins and outs of romantic relationships.
“We were like, ‘People kind of know what these things are, that the formula for them is very easy: You kind of know what James Bond’s going to have,” he recounted. “How do we make it not feel that way?’ We were like, ‘It’s not a spy show with romance on it; it’s a romance show with spy on it.’”
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