Donald Glover said the advice he received from Brad Pitt about starring in the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” reboot wasn’t exactly groundbreaking.
While appearing on “The Tonight Show” alongside his co-star, Maya Erskine, Glover jokingly told host Jimmy Fallon that the Oscar winner “Brad Pitt-ed” his way out of properly passing the torch ahead of the new series, which is based on his and Angelina Jolie’s 2005 action film of the same name.
“He didn’t give me any real [pointers],” Glover revealed on Tuesday. “He kind of Brad Pitt-ed his way out of it. He just kind of like, charmed his way. He was like, ‘Yeah, you know, you’ll do great.’”
Pitt’s guidance would have been ideal considering Glover, who co-created the upcoming show alongside “Atlanta” producer Francesca Sloane, admitted to Fallon that he hadn’t watched the beloved action-comedy spy film when it first came out.
“I hadn’t at the time,” he said, adding, “I’ve seen it, obviously, by now. It’d be scary if I hadn’t. It’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s what this is about? Spies?’”
Similar to the nearly 20-year-old movie, the reboot series follows “two lonely strangers, John and Jane, who have given up their lives and identities to be thrown together as partners – both in espionage and in marriage,” according to the show’s synopsis.
Elsewhere in the interview, Erskine admitted that she was warned in advance about the pressures that could come from remixing Jolie’s role.
“[Glover] told me what it was going to be like but I felt like there was so much pressure and expectation around, you know, Angelina Jolie. Like, she’s the sexiest,” she said.
Erskine revealed that the expectations for the series were especially daunting during photoshoots for the reboot’s promo run, in which the pair were asked to turn up the sexiness.
“I had a photographer who was like, ‘You know, this needs to be a really sexy shoot. We need to get your inner sexy out. What’s your inner sexual animal?’ And I was like, ‘Worm,’” she quipped.
“My friends call me ‘Worm’ because they think I’m spineless sometimes,” she continued. “So I’m like, ‘That’s why I’m “Worm.”’ And he’s like, ‘That’s not going to work. That’s not going to work. You can’t do worm.’”
The “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” reboot series hits Prime Video on Friday.
