Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s marriage with Amazon going strong despite creative divorce from Donald Glover

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!