Nicole Kidman Dropped Out of Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Opposite Brad Pitt as John Smith, a highly skilled assassin moonlighting as a construction exec, the role of his wife Jane Smith—equally proficient killer/tech support consultant who’s dissatisfied with her marriage—in Mr. & Mrs. Smith was originally going to be played by Nicole Kidman. But she had as scheduling conflict making The Stepford Wives and then a discouraged Pitt moved on to make the Greek war epic Troy.
Cate Blanchett, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Pitt’s ex-fiancée Gwyneth Paltrow were among the actresses considered in the meantime.
All seemed lost for the long-gestating production when Angelina Jolie signed on to play Jane in August 2003. Pitt rejoined the project, thinking a November start date would leave plenty of time for him to go shoot Ocean’s 12 in April.
“Nicole’s exit could have been a death blow,” producer Lucas Foster told Variety at the time. “When you have a picture with a star like Brad, it gets heavily scrutinized and at moments of uncertainty, every studio steps in and offers him movies. The key to making this work was the fact that [director Doug Liman] remained so passionately committed and articulate about what he wanted to do with it. It gave Brad confidence and made it possible to get Angelina. We all think they will make a pair that you will want to see battling each other and falling back in love.”
Mr. Smith Almost Went to Johnny Depp or Will Smith
After Pitt seemingly left the project for good, they made offers to Will Smith and Johnny Depp.
“There were some of us who liked one of them a lot more than the other, and some of us in the camp who liked the other one more,” Liman told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. "The end result is we ended up pursuing both. Then Brad changed his mind and said, 'I'm interested again.'"
He said Fight Club director David Fincher told him, “’Get used to it. That’s just the nature of the beast making a movie with Brad Pitt.’”
How Angelina Jolie Started Getting Into Character
At the start of rehearsals, "they were putting us together and trying outfits on us, seeing how we look as a couple,” Jolie told Vogue, about a week after she met Pitt. “It’s always so silly; you don’t know somebody and in three days you’re going to be ‘married.’ But he’s lovely, Brad Pitt. He’s very sweet.”
She described Mr. & Mrs. Smith as “a study in marriage and how well you know your partner. There’s everything from couples therapy to arguing about the drapes, and you think they’re having affairs, and then you slowly discover that the reason they’re having problems is because they have very different lives and have secrets from each other.”
At the time, Pitt had been married to Jennifer Aniston since 2000 and Jolie was twice-divorced, from Jonny Lee Miller in 1999 and Billy Bob Thornton in 2003, each after about three years of marriage.
“My opinion of marriage comes from a very cynical place,” Jolie explained. “Do you want to kill your spouse? For me, that’s a serious question. And Brad Pitt comes from a place of: What a funny idea, to kill the person you’re married to, because he has a happy marriage. So we’re actually a very funny combination.”
She drew from her past to inform her character. “For me, it was a lot of thinking about old relationships I had—marriages I had," she told EW before the movie came out in June 2005, "and thinking, Oh, that’s the point where I wanted to kill that person.”
Brad vs. Angelina on the Range
John and Jane Smith come out with guns a-blazing, most memorably toward the film’s climax when they join forces to vanquish those who’d have them dead and have each other’s back in extreme fashion.
“We went to gun training, which is actually one of the most dangerous things two actors can do,” Jolie told Vanity Fair in 2005. "We would go to rifle ranges and actually compete with each other.”
Using live ammunition, she noted, “You had to trust each other to cross under or over and only move when the other person moves, so the trust, when somebody’s got a loaded gun at your back…It made us trust each other quickly, you know?”
Angelina Jolie Cruised Through That Window Herself
When Jane had to make her escape from a 40th-floor hotel window, Jolie opted to do the stunt herself.
“I happened to get this stunt that suited me,” she said on TODAY in 2005. “But, yeah, I was a little unsure about something the first time I went down and my coat flew off and I thought, Oh, I have no pants on. I have no pants on and there's just a crowd of people on the floor.”
Brad Pitt Crashed a Wedding
Pitt surprised another mister and missus while making Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
“We were filming down in this Deco building downtown, and up in the penthouse above, we kept seeing people going up and down,” he told W in 2023. “It was a wedding party, so I crashed it. And they were okay with it.”
Angelina Jolie Realized She Was Excited to Get to Set
“Because of the film we ended up being brought together to do all these crazy things, and I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened,” Jolie recalled in the January 2007 issue of Vogue, describing the evolution of her feelings for Pitt, from costar to something more. “I think a few months in I realized, God, I can’t wait to get to work.”
“Whether it was shooting a scene or arguing about a scene or gun practice or dance class or doing stunts—anything we had to do with each other,” Jolie continued, “we just found a lot of joy in it together and a lot of real teamwork. We just became kind of a pair.”
Mr. & Mrs. Smith Paused as Brad Pitt Left to Make Ocean’s Twelve
When they started filming in January 2004, Liman knew that Pitt had to leave for Europe that April to make Ocean’s Twelve with Steven Soderbergh, but did he know?
“The first day of my shoot, we were still arguing about the [initial] stop date,” Liman told EW. “They were going to not let us start shooting the movie until the stop date situation was worked out. We started shooting and it wasn’t worked out at all. And sure enough [by April] it was like, ‘No, he really is leaving.’”
Liman admitted that he didn’t think Soderbergh would actually start then. “He doesn’t have a script yet,” he recalled thinking. “And movies of that scale just don’t start on time.”
Reminded that the exact same thing happened to him when he made The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon, who had to leave to make Ocean’s Eleven, Liman quipped, “For the second time in a row, I bet against Steven Soderbergh.”
Pitt was gone for three months and they resumed filming that fall.
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston Announced Their Separation in January 2005
On Jan. 7, 2005, Pitt and Aniston announced they were splitting up. (She filed for divorce in March and all was finalized that October.)
“For those who follow these sorts of things, we would like to explain that our separation is not the result of any of the speculation reported by the tabloid media," they said in a joint statement. "This decision is the result of much thoughtful consideration. We happily remain committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another."
The speculation they were referring to: Rumors Pitt had an extramarital romance with Jolie.
“It’s obviously been difficult with all this bulls--t going on,” Jolie told Vanity Fair of life amid the headlines. “I’ve been tied to everybody I ever worked with.”
But, she said with a shrug, “I live in England.” And when Pitt’s split news broke, she added, “I was in Niger in a place where there are no newspapers and nobody gossips.”
Paparazzi Followed Brad Pitt to Set After His Divorce News
“There were always paparazzi,” Liman told EW, “crazy paparazzi,” but they kicked it up a notch after Pitt and Aniston announced their separation.
“We heard the helicopter before we heard him—a helicopter that had been following him since he left the Beverly Hills Hotel,” the director said. “That was taking it up to a new level. We were told that a photo of the two of them together would be worth $300,000.”
The paparazzi used scanners to eavesdrop on the crew’s walkie-talkies, Liman said, “and one of the PAs got yelled at because he said something that could have been misinterpreted.”
They were shooting in a home decor store and Pitt and Jolie were passing time in between takes, Liman recalled, “And a PA said, ‘Brad is screwing around with Angie’”—as in, they were just hanging out, playing with paddle balls or some such—"and they’re like, ‘Look, you’ve got to be careful how you speak if you’re going to say something over the radio about them.’ On this movie, saying someone was screwing around would have a different context.”
Mr. & Mrs. Smith Got a Third Ending
Cast and crew regrouped yet again in April 2005 to shoot another ending—after they don’t kill each other, they're continuing to work out their issues in therapy—which was the one they went with.
Liman saw the choice to give the Smiths a happy, if open-ended, ending as a metaphor.
“It was important to not give it that resolution,” he explained to EW. “Because if you think about a relationship, there is no point at which you suddenly defeat the forces of antagonism. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we got married, we’re finished having to fight for the relationship.’”
One of the discarded endings involved Mr. and Mrs. Smith getting the better of another villain couple, first played by Jacquline Bisset (Jolie’s godmother, FYI) and Terrence Stamp, then recast as Angela Bassett and Keith David. Those roles were trimmed and Bassett is only heard on the phone as Mr. Smith’s boss.
The Budget Ballooned
“The studio said to us you have to stop the monetary hemorrhaging,” producer Foster told the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the film ended up costing $126 million after being budgeted at $100 million.
Liman later said he was proud of thinking outside the big-studio-movie box.
"There was a point maybe 10 days into the shoot for Mr. & Mrs. Smith where I realized I wasn’t taking as many risks, where I realized I was being driven by how much money is on the line, and I had to fight against that," he told The Talks. While he gambled and won making Swingers on a $200,000 budget, for Mr. & Mrs. Smith "the budget was north of 100 million, it’s a different story. So I did have to get back to a more independent way of thinking, really drive that out of my mind to get back to that sort of liberty of having nothing, like I did on Swingers. And in the end, the things I did on Mr. & Mrs. Smith were some of the biggest risks of my career."
The Movie Could Have Been Funnier
While Mr. & Mrs. Smith boasts plenty of wisecracks—“Still alive, baby?” Jane asks her husband before they reconcile—it was originally written as more of a comedy.
“Simon Kinberg’s script was actually funnier,” Liman told EW. “There was a moment I loved in the script where she grabs his golf trophy. And she’s going to club him over the head with it and he says, ‘No! Don’t! I’m only the custodian of that for the year!’ It was a little too goofy for Brad and Angie.”
Highbrow Material
The original script was Kinberg’s graduate school thesis project while getting his Master’s in Fine Arts from Columbia University, inspired by some friends’ assessment of marriage counseling.
“The way they were talking about it sounded kind of aggressive and mercenary,” the London-born filmmaker said, per ScreenRant. “And I just thought it would make an interesting template for a relationship inside of an action film.”
Was There a Sex Scene Edited Out of Mr. & Mrs. Smith?
Eventually, instead of fighting to the death, the Smiths tear each other’s clothes off and reconnect, and there was speculation that, in light of Jolie-Pitt affair rumors, the scene was made more PG (the film itself is only PG-13).
Liman said the biggest discussion about it was over music, with the director—who advocated for The Mescaleros’ “Mongo Bongo”—winning out over a producer who wanted “something sweeter musically” over the action, lest Jolie come off as too much of a vixen.
There Were No Test Screenings for Mr. & Mrs. Smith
"There was so much, um, attention on the movie that the studio was scared of any negative fall-out that could come from a test screening,” Liman told the BBC toward the end of 2005, referring to the burgeoning Brangelina hype ahead of the film’s release that June.
But while he understood “where the studio is coming from, and they're not wrong,” he still thought the film—which made $487 million worldwide—could’ve benefited from audience notes.
“You know, I really thank God for the reviews,” Liman said, “because with all the success of Mr. & Mrs. Smith financially, I still think there are things that I could have done better and the reviewers called me up on that, so they keep you honest.”
He didn’t name anything specific he would’ve changed, but said, “it's more just about certain moments within the movie that I could have done a slightly better job on.”
What Happened With Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the Set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith
While they asked for kindness and privacy in their split announcement, Aniston later chided Pitt for missing a “sensitivity chip” in response to the 60-page W photo spread he did with Jolie titled “Domestic Bliss” that was published July 1, 2005.
“Is it odd timing? Yeah. But it's not my life," Aniston said in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair. "He makes his choices. He can do—whatever. We're divorced, and you can see why."
The Friends alum also said that Pitt had told her he did not have an affair with Jolie.
"I choose to believe my husband," she said. "At this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything, but I would much rather choose to believe him."
As for Jolie's POV? “It took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realize that it might mean something more than we’d earlier allowed ourselves to believe," she told Vogue. "And both knowing that the reality of that was a big thing, something that was going to take a lot of serious consideration.”
Responding to Jolie’s recollections, Aniston told Vogue later that year, "There was stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening. I felt those details were a little inappropriate to discuss...That stuff about how she couldn't wait to get to work every day? That was really uncool.”
Though it wasn’t necessarily negating anything she’d said before, Jolie further raised eyebrows when she told the New York Times in October 2008 that she looked forward to showing her and Pitt’s kids—Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne—Mr. & Mrs. Smith, because “not a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.”
However, she didn't mention that it might be a first for the whole family.
Asked if they watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith for the happy memories, Pitt—who named it as one of his favorite Jolie films—told Rolling Stone in 2008, "We've never seen it."
But it was a favorite, he clarified, "because, you know...six kids. Because I fell in love."
What Did the Jolie-Pitt Kids Think of Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Time went by and, when Maddox and Pax were 12 and 10, they were apparently old enough to watch.
"The older ones recently saw Mr. & Mrs. Smith and I think they thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen," Jolie told reporters at a Maleficent press conference in May 2014, not specifying which kids had a laugh (Zahara was next-oldest, at 9). "Watching your parents fight as spies is some kind of strange fantasy."