Italian
Maya Erskine, who was Emmy-nominated for her portrayal of Jane Smith in Prime Video‘s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” sat down with Variety’s Angelique Jackson at an FYC event to talk about forming a bond with her co-star Donald Glover, preparing for the physicality the role required and what drew her to Jane as an outsider character.
A vital element of the show’s success and 16 Emmy nominations was Erskine and Glover’s on-screen chemistry. Yet the two didn’t have a single chemistry read before being cast together.
“Basically he talked to me on FaceTime three times and I had no idea what he was talking to me about,” Erskine recalled. “He wasn’t making it clear to me, wasn’t talking to me. He wanted to know my vibe and that was sort of his way of assessing if we had chemistry or something there.”
What ultimately drew Erskine to playing Jane Smith and saying yes to the show was the central theme of arranged marriage.
Erskine described the pitch: “It was this take on marriage with the spy backdrop so you’re getting these grand, Bond moments but then it’s all these nuanced parts of a relationship. That was really exciting to me to see that pairing because I’ve never seen that before. With Jane especially, I identified with someone who feels like such an outsider in life, never quite fitting in and looking for her identity to be solidified in this world. I think that’s something we can all relate to.”
But of course, like previous takes on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” story, the show offers plenty of action sequences. Erskine trained for several months to feel confident in the physicality of playing Jane and performing stunts.
Erskine said: “I was not a gym person when I started this and I had to become one. I had also just given birth. Donald [Glover] kept asking, ‘Are you sure you want this?’ He kept asking because he was like, ‘It’s going to be a lot.’ And it was.”
Erskine jokingly described how in the first episode, she faked the action by doing the “Tom Cruise run” that she was taught.
“Which makes it seem like you’re actually running fast when you’re not,” Erskine explained. “Then I started to run more and more. I got a little better by the eighth episode. We were running all over New York and the stairs … You learn fast from that.”
Another crucial element of figuring out Jane’s character was her wardrobe.
“Sometimes we veered on too masculine or too feminine,” Erskine said. “We were trying to find this rich version of what Jane herself would wear, which is interesting because you would walk into this company [that] knows exactly what you would want to buy if you had the money so they all have those clothes for you … figuring out what that was exactly was a pretty big challenge.”
