Maya Erskine

Episode notes

(Photo: David Lee/ Prime Video)

Maya Erskine is a comedian, writer and actor. In 2019, she co-created the terrific comedy show Pen15 which she and fellow creator Anna Konkle star as lightly fictionalized middle school versions of themselves.

More recently, she starred in the Amazon Prime series Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It’s an action thriller in which she stars opposite Donald Glover.

You may know Mr. and Mrs. Smith as the 2005 blockbuster where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play married contract killers who end up having to kill each other. It’s a great movie, but it could also be fair to say that it’s goofy, broad and a little corny.

Mr and Mrs. Smith, the TV show, is pretty different from the film. In fact, not many of the showrunners and stars really watched that original movie. They took the premise and ran with it: what kind of people would sign up for that kind of a job in the first place? What kind of partner do those people make? And, where do you hide a body?

Maya Erskine joins the show to talk about how she prepared for her role on Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We also get into her time in college and how she’d make skits with her longtime friend and collaborator Anna Konkle. Plus, she shares some stories with us about her time in arts high school.