The minute Donald Glover enters the room, Maya Erskine starts beaming. They have the familiarity and comic timing of two people who know each other very well— close-knit siblings, maybe, or a long-married couple. A cloud of giggles seems to float between them as they answer questions about Mr. & Mrs. Smith, their new series premiering on Amazon Prime on February 2. It’s the chemistry between Glover and Erskine that brings heat to Mr. & Mrs. Smith—a spy-rom-com that reimagines the roles originally played by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the hit 2005 movie.

Glover and Erskine play two wannabe spies partnered up by a mysterious entity they nickname “Hihi” (that’s how he greets them in his messages). They are given new names (John and Jane Smith), a marriage license, and a spectacular Manhattan townhouse that would make Nancy Meyers’s characters jealous. Then they are sent forth into all sorts of glamorous locales to trail, eavesdrop on, and sometimes murder strangers for unknown reasons. A number of high-profile actors materialize throughout the season in guest roles (among them John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, Paul Dano, and Michaela Coel), but Glover and Erskine are the main act. As the Smiths, they have no one to trust but each other. Gradually, their fake intimacy grows real.

Cocreated by Glover and Francesca Sloane (who spent time in the writers room on Glover’s brilliantly avant-weird Atlanta), the series originally partnered Glover and Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It seemed like a perfect match of idiosyncratic minds, until Waller-Bridge bowed out. Erskine, the cocreator of Pen15, is an equally inventive figure who’s traded her adolescent Pen15 character and bowl cut for a (mostly) more mature role. She and Glover sat together on a hotel couch to talk to Vanity Fair about why they’d be bad spies, what makes marriage sexy, and farting.

Vanity Fair: Mr. & Mrs. Smith throws together two strangers. Did you know each other before shooting?

Maya Erskine: No, but I knew of him because we both went to NYU and he was in a sketch-comedy group there. So he was famous to me.

Donald Glover: Obviously, I’d seen Pen15, and once we knew Phoebe was going another way, Fran [Sloane] brought up Maya. I was like, Ahhhh.

Pen15 gave viewers a very specific, adolescent side of you.

Erskine: That’s the real side, once you get to know me.

Glover: She hates that I say this, but it actually is very true: Maya is one of the funniest people I know. She’s in my top three: Jim Rash, her, and my brother.

Erskine: But funny in a way that I’m not trying to be—I think that’s how he means it. I’m not clever or witty.

Glover: I wouldn’t say that. [Giggles] But she says things that I’m like, Why did you think that? It’s a special thing.

Where does Donald rate in your funny pantheon?

Erskine: Oh, he’s top three or…I’d say top five. He makes me laugh really hard, and I don’t have hard laughs all the time. It’s when he roasts me that I especially lose it. He’s really good at making fun of me.

Glover: That’s my love language, roasting you.

Can each of you tell me a foible the other one has that would make them a really poor spy in real life?

Glover: Maya would worry a lot about stuff that was already done. It’d be like, It’s over, he’s dead—and I feel like you wouldn’t be able to let it go. But that’s kind of what makes you funny.

Erskine: I feel like you’re so present that you don’t remember things. So maybe you would not remember names and people—or even, like, who you’re supposed to be.

Glover: That is exactly right! I’d say, “I’m Derrick.” And they’d be like, “I thought you said your name is Adam.”

On this series, your characters are imperfect spies, but they improve as their relationship gets more intimate. How different is it from an acting role where you’re assigned to pretend you’re a married couple?

Erskine: It mirrors it completely.

Glover: We definitely felt like we were a work husband and wife—we started arguing and the teasing came out.

Erskine: At first it was us getting to know each other, feeling each other out, and becoming friends, exactly as it was on the show. It was great that we filmed in order, at least in the beginning, because the chemistry could build in real life as it does in the show.

Both of you created your own adventurous series in the past, and you’re both writers, but you aren’t credited with writing the show. Was that intentional?

Glover: I remember when we hired you, one of the first things you said was: “I don’t have to write anything, do I?” [Erskine laughs hard] I was like, “No, you don’t have to.” But she wrote stuff on set.

Erskine: It was very collaborative on set, but what was nice was I then didn’t have to go off and write in a room. It was so freeing to be able to just walk in and focus on the part. And I’d guess we ad-libbed about 20%? Thirty percent?

Glover: I feel like the arguments were very ad-libbed. You realize arguments are really each person trying to keep pulling the conversation toward their strong suits. So it’s never gonna really make sense. So yeah, a lot of that was improv.

The early part of the series weaves in a lot of little intimacies as they get to know each other, including a fart theme—

Glover: Like on a soundtrack: “The Fart Theme.” It keeps coming back!

Erskine: It is what drew me to this project. [Glover bursts out laughing] Okay, the farts are not what drew me, but they mentioned it in one of the first conversations we had about it. They said, “We want to explore the minutiae, the in-between moments of a relationship, not just the big, grandiose meet-cutes and breakups. And they said, “One of you is going to fart in front of the other for the first time.” And I was like, “Can I please be that person?”

Glover: Fran always says, “That’s when I knew she was Jane.” Because she wasn’t worried about being cute, she wanted to fart.

It’s a classic love story: You had me at fart.

Erskine: It’s so crass, but yeah, that’s real.

Donald, you originally planned to do this with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She told me that collaboration is like a marriage, and “some marriages don’t work out”— which is a theme of the show. How much did the show change when she left?

Glover: I don’t think it changed dramatically at all. The thing with Phoebe and our relationship was interesting. Fleabag is one of the best shows maybe ever. I really love that show. On paper, it felt like our sensibilities are the same on a lot of things. But you realize that the way you handle certain things—her whole process is very different from our process. Also, in the UK there aren’t really writers rooms. She did Fleabag pretty much by herself, over years onstage. America’s kind of like a running gun where it’s like, “Okay, you guys got a million dollars and 10 days, and it better be good!”

Once Maya came in, we just kind of tailored the character to her—and Maya tailored the character to herself. I was like, “Whatever you’re good at, whatever you feel this person is, we will write toward that.” To me, acting should be embarrassing. It’s very vulnerable. So I felt like the only way we could get that is if it felt like Maya.

Erskine: You guys did construct such a well-formed character already that she was her own weird thing, but then we infused parts of myself.

Are there particular scenes that come to mind where you felt the most vulnerable?

Glover: Any time when my shirt was off. I’m not that person. I’m just not. You watch movies and yeah, they’re about to take a shirt off. But I did not know there’s preparation for it. Like: Okay, 15 minutes before, drink orange juice. But don’t eat anything the night before. Do push-ups, no water. It was like: Fuck! I felt very vulnerable. I guess that’s like a little surface?

Erskine: That might seem surface, but we are playing these roles of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Trying to come across as attractive is an element to this show. And that is something that I always shy away from. I don’t like the idea of trying to appear attractive—because if you fail, that’s embarrassing! So it’s easier to just be like, I’ll just wear this bowl cut and a mustache. You don’t have to think I’m attractive. I already beat you at the game. So in that sense, I get that fear. That’s vulnerable.

Glover: With the Angelina Jolie–Brad Pitt of it all, we weren’t going to win that game. We weren’t trying to win that game, even though I feel like we’re way hotter than them. [smiles] But we talked about it a lot: If you watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith the movie, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are super perfect, shiny, clean. That is the setup. During the pandemic, I felt this show was really about loneliness, and the hot thing is: This is actual intimacy. You’re gonna get your farts, but you’re also gonna get people understanding and trusting and holding you when you need it. That is actually what makes marriage hot.

I don’t know one woman who married a guy and didn’t hate him at the beginning. My mom always told me her story, and I was like, “It don’t sound like you liked Dad at the beginning!” But then slowly, it becomes, I really can’t imagine my life without this person. That only comes with time and trust, and that’s what we were focusing on with this.

Jane, in particular, is very guarded, distrustful at first. Can you talk about her arc?

Erskine: I haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’m a nightmare of a person to watch anything that I’m a part of because I’ll ruin it for everyone. Like: Oh, I hate that, we should have fixed that take.

Going back to the original flaw that would make you a poor spy.

Glover: But that’s a good relationship! They really do balance each other—I mean, the characters do. The whole concept we kept going back to is: Why do people get married at all anymore? There’s always something or someone better, so why even try? We tried a little bit with these episodes to discuss that and look at the hard parts. We even do therapy, and they’re really hard therapy sessions, but then afterward, we have that funny, weird kind of joking, even though it’s serious. It’s like when a breakup is happening and you both kind of want to go back to the way it was. But you also know the breakup is coming. That stuff feels true.

Did you bring any of that home to your actual relationships?

Glover: I brought a lot from the relationship into this. My wife is gonna be like, “Wow, you put that in there?” [Laughs] She definitely is. We’re not gonna watch it together.

Speaking of working marriages, Maya, didn’t you make a movie called Sacramento with your husband?

Erskine: We actually met because of that movie. They all make fun of me because they call it a casting couch. But it wasn’t because—[Glover giggles] No, no, no! See, I shouldn’t even say that. Don’t joke about it! He offered the movie to me and then we met after, and we became friends and then fell in love. The movie never got made until this past year, after we had been married and had a kid.

So it wasn’t a Mr. & Mrs. Smith situation?

Erskine: Where we started to want to kill each other? Not yet, but we’ll see!