Donald Glover Explains Why Phoebe Waller Bridge Exited 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith,' Reveals Why She Left & Not Him

Donald Glover is speaking out about the original version of his TV show Mr. & Mrs. Smith that would have starred him alongside Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

If you don’t know, they were originally set to co-star as the leads, but Phoebe stepped away in September of 2021. Donald is now telling his version of the events. The show recently debuted on Prime Video with PEN15‘s Maya Erskine taking over for Phoebe.

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Donald shared with THR, “It’s a divorce in a weird way. You’re like, ‘Oh sh-t, 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.”

He continued, “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. And I look back at Atlanta, and we built a culture where we could say mean things to each other or be like, ‘That idea is kind of [crap],’ and then we’d laugh. You weren’t afraid to say something — but we also had the right to roast you. It’s just how we got the laughs.”

He added, “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. It’s like, ‘This is how I run my ship.’ ‘Well, this is how I run my ship.’ And it’s such a big idea, this show, I don’t think it can have two captains. I mean, she rewrote the pilot, and I saw her script and I was like, ‘It’s definitely not my style,’ but if she’d done it with her in it, we’d all be like, ‘This is a great f-cking show.’”

About when to know it was time to “divorce,” Donald said, “It’s like a real divorce where the hardest part is knowing when to say it’s over. Like, when do you quit? Because you want to be cool, like, ‘Oh it’s over, that’s fine.’ But we both put a lot of work into it. We both were working really hard. So, who gets to keep the cat? (Laughs.)”

And about why he got to continue working on the show while she exited, he said, “But I’d brought [showrunner Francesca “Fran” Sloane] in, and also, I feel like Phoebe wasn’t fully in love with the thing. 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.’”

Phoebe previously explained the real reason why she chose to exit the series.