How Angelina Jolie Made Maya Erskine Doubt Her ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ Performance
Angelina Jolie famously slugged it out with Brad Pitt in the 2005 action thriller Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Years later, Maya Erskine would inherit Jolie’s role as Jane Smith in the Amazon Prime adaptation of the blockbuster hit. But when looking back at Jolie’s performance, Erskine briefly second-guessed if she could measure up to her predecessor.
Maya Erskine had to get out of her head when thinking about Angelina Jolie in ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’
Mr. and Mrs. Smith remains one of Jolie’s most memorable roles. To deliver on her performance, Jolie said she thought about hurting her ex Billy Bob Thornton for motivation. The actor was proud enough of the film that she once entertained a sequel with her and Pitt. But she wasn’t impressed by the ideas pitched regarding a Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2.
“We did ask somebody to look into ‘Mr. and Mrs’ to see if they could crack a sequel. But there wasn’t anything original. It was just, ‘Well, they’re going to get married, or they’ve got kids, or they get separated.’ Never great,” Jolie once told MTV News (via Bang Premiere).
Jolie also considered the possibility that audiences wouldn’t want to see a real-life couple playing husband and wife on-screen. She didn’t have to entertain this concern with the first film since Jolie and Pitt weren’t together back then.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith eventually landed a sequel of sorts. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star in a reimagined version of the 2005 feature that became a streaming show instead of a film. Erskine especially felt the pressure of stepping into Jolie’s shoes. She made the brief mistake of comparing herself to Jolie’s portrayal of their character. It cost her the confidence she needed to tackle her role.
“I’d given birth the year before. I hadn’t exercised, and I wasn’t really taking care of my body,” Erkshine said in an interview with The Guardian. “You look at Angelina Jolie in the film and she’s a total goddess, and I was thinking: ‘Well, I can’t be her.’ I knew I was never going to push myself to get Marvel ripped and turn myself into this f***ing babe.”
“These were not helpful thoughts, so I really had to accept that I was going to be a real woman. I’m not going to be perfect and that’s OK. I decided it would still be sexy, but in a different way,” she added.
Maya Erskine learned to love her ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ training
Although Erskine accepted that she didn’t need to be Jolie to play Jane Smith, she still needed to train for the role. It wasn’t like Pen15, where Erskine played an exaggerated teenage version of herself with her real mother as her on-screen mom. Erskine was playing an assassin in the series and had to look and feel believable in the role. She wasn’t a fan of training at first. But she later appreciated how her strict regimen distracted her from her concerns about her role.
“For Jane, it was all about becoming strong and [being] in my body,” she told Backstage. “I had just had a baby, and I didn’t really understand how much I would be taking on. I spent several months training hardcore; I hated it at first but grew to love it. When you’re doing something so physical, you don’t have time to overthink, so you can’t get in your head. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, all I have to think about is this one task and achieve that.’ It just puts you in the moment like no other.”
