Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s marriage with Amazon going strong despite creative divorce from Donald Glover
Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks forward to Tomb Raider at Prime Video after leaving Mrs. And Mrs. Smith
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Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s relationship with Amazon Prime Video is still going strong (a “mid-eight-figure range” deal was renewed in 2022, per The Hollywood Reporter), despite the fact that she hasn’t actually produced much content for Prime Video. “What I look for in something is that little bit of electricity, of danger or saying something, doing something that hasn’t been done before. If I don’t feel that, I can plow and plow and plow, I just won’t make it,” she tells Vanity Fair in a new profile. “They’ve been with me along this process where I’m like, ‘I’m getting there, but I want it to be fucking amazing.’”
That apparently means knowing when to walk away, as she did from the streamer’s Mr. And Mrs. Smith series. Waller-Bridge was developing the show with her Solo co-star Donald Glover, and was set to star alongside him before being replaced by Maya Erskine. “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it—still care about it,” she says now. “And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.” Comparing her collaboration with Glover to a marriage, she adds that “some marriages don’t work out.”
Now she’s moving on to Tomb Raider, which seems like a surprise from the creative force behind Fleabag but is perfectly in keeping with the artist whose last five years have been defined by Star Wars, James Bond, and Indiana Jones. Waller-Bridge is also a longtime Lara Croft fan, and hopes to pull an “old Trojan horse” with her take on the franchise.
“Having worked on Bond and having worked as an actor on Indy, I feel like I’ve been building up to this. What if I could take the reins on an action franchise, with everything I’ve learned, with a character I adore, and also just bring back some of that ’90s vibe?” wonders the Emmy winner. “There’s room to do something really quite dangerous. And if I can do something dangerous and exciting with Tomb Raider, I already have an audience of people who love Lara and hopefully will continue to. And that is a very unusual position to be in.” We shall see!
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You have Mrs. and Mrs. Smith in the sub-header. Do all of you just use the same broken keyboard to type this up?
Actually, this would be a pretty good spin on the reboot. A married couple fighting Lesbian Bed Death is actually made of two frumpy at home, sexy in the field operatives who find themselves on opposite sides. Big set piece in the third act with “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” playing in the background, bam, that’s half the script done right there. If anyone at Amazon is reading this, I charge way less that Waller-Bridge. Just send me a check for $100,000 and we’ll call it even.
That sounds like the perfect follow-up to Deadloch.
Let’s go even further: ‘Mrs. and Mrs. and Mrs. and Mrs. Smith’, about a lesbian polycule.
This site is copyedited by a 4-year-old
She’s 28 in dog years.
You really shouldn’t insult 4 years olds like that
I had no idea she was doing Tomb Raider. That’ll be interesting. It can’t be worse than what we’ve already seen.
“Hold my beer”or “Famous last words”Your pick! lol
It’s wild to think that the original (not so much the sequel) was considered the high water mark for video game movies for many, many years. To say nothing else about it, as I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters, I will say Jolie as Croft was really great casting, at least physically speaking. Would’ve been nice to get a Brit in the role though, something that I’m sure PWB’s series will make sure not to miss. I think Emilia Clarke, Hayley Atwell, Gemma Arterton, or Lena Heady would be good choices, depending on which version of the character they’re going for.
While I wouldn’t mind those choices at all, I doubt whoever’s in charge would approve of anyone in their mid thirties or beyond. Not in a world where we get articles about how Hilary Duff manages to stay alive at the withered old age of 35.
never even thought of Atwell, she’d have done great with her hair in the classic ponytail
Didn’t Jolie also quite literally become the face of Lara Croft for multiple games? Legend and Underworld at least. The film therefore even made its mark on game history.
I would watch the hell out of a Gemma Arterton Tomb Raider.And I do like that your shortlist is 50% Sarah Connor.
While I thought No Time to Die was pretty terrible, Phoebe still has banked so much faith and goodwill that I’ll definitely line up for whatever she has next.
Tomb Raider? Sure, why not? There’s no reason why that always had to be as bad as it was.
I gather you didn’t enjoy the Angelina Jolie films? (I didn’t see them myself, for what it’s worth.) For that matter, how did they end up screwing up the Uncharted film? That also ought to have been a slam-dunk…
I saw the first Angelina Jolie film. It was barely mediocre and I heard the second one was worse, so I skipped it. I started to watch the Alicia Vikander version on a plane once, but 15 minutes in, I realized that my time would be better spent asleep.But, yeah, just like Uncharted, there’s no reason why those movies couldn’t have been good. But they weren’t. Sigh.
I believe the hard thing about an Uncharted film is where to start. Do you start with Nate’s backstory with Sully? Do you include Sam? Do you base its spirit more on the second game, a forward-moving plot with a warlord as your adversary? Do you include the paranormal? Go introspective as the fourth game did? They made a jumble of it all, but I can’t blame them all that much. Unless you’re doing a straight adaptation of the games, there is too much you want to include.
I heard all kinds of great stuff about the Last of Us, but to me that is a fluke.In general, Uncharted is one of those games that is basically already a film = it does not need a live action remake. Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid are the same.
i am a fan of hers, and therefore i am glad for all of her recent accolades in such high profile projects.but man, i can’t wait until she does something original again. fleabag (and killing eve’s best season) was what made her a hot commodity; that’s the stuff i want to see. i don’t really care about indy or star wars or tomb raider or some other rehash and reboot.
Taking the international tourism part of the first season of Killing Eve (agreed it was the best season), and marrying that kind of style to the adventure serial (Lara Croft started as basically a female version of Indiana Jones) could have the kind of creative spark that I would hope for in a new PWB project.
the problem with giving her an 8-figure deal is she’s gonna be stuck doing 8-figure deal projects. i think it’ll be quite a while before we see anything ‘real’ from her again.
true. i still hope she gets to sneak one in somewhere.
Money, as it so often is in the creative industries, is a noose. I expect a lot of the edge to be rounded off.
I believe it is almost impossible to continue being subversive and daring and original when you’re handed a mid-eight-figure range by one of the largest companies of the planet and you don’t say no, I’d rather make less money and have less pressure on me by trying to live up to that investment.
Agreed. Finding out the creators of Atlanta and Fleabag were teaming up for a Mr & Mrs. Smith remake was like finding out PTA and Scorsese were teaming up for the feature-length debut of Manimal.
Actually, I would watch the shit out of that.
Hey, 8 figures? Quick, queue up the ‘late stage capitalism’ outrage!
Do the 8 figures include the cents?
NOT THIS TIME
Nothing against Vikander but I still can’t believe they didn’t hire either Emilia Clarke or Daisy Ridley for Lara Croft, they both seem like they’d have been amazing
I think both of them would have been good fits, but both were possibly at the busiest times of their whole careers finishing up their respective franchises when the movie was being produced
“…doing something that hasn’t been done before.”Like a reboot of a reboot of a video game adaptation?
Yes! Video game movies have been rebooted – like in the recent Mario movie. But what video game franchise has been rebooted twice? That honor normally is limited to comic book superheros.
Except of course (as I’m sure you knew) I was making the point that she’s working on something hugely unoriginal because of the history of the franchise. I really wish the thing with Donald Glover had worked (not Mr & Mrs Smith – something original) because Glover’s speech before presenting her BAFTA was comedy gold.
That honor normally is limited to comic book superheros.And normally only to DC comic book superheroes, after, ah, shit, Warner Bros fucked it all up again!
I’m really not familiar with her work other than whatever she contributed to No Time To Die – nothing in which stood out to me as “fucking amazing.”