Andy Warhol’s painting plays the starring role in ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’

In 2013, Andy Warhol Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), a 1963 painting depicting an image of a bloody accident printed many times, sold at Sotheby’s for $104.5 million, making it the most expensive work by the Pop artist ever to be auctioned. But in an alternate world, that painting—or a version of it, anyway—sold for $106 million during a silent auction that was intercepted by two undercover spies.

That alternate world is portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Amazon’s new TV series about an arranged espionage marriage between two employees of a shadowy organization. The titular couple, played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, are sent in the second episode to intercept a rich man trying to buy the Warhol painting during a glittering function in New York.

No Warhol painting of that caliber would sell at a party like that, of course. Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) it belongs to “Death and Disaster,” an acclaimed series in which the artist appropriated sordid images of carnage and screen-printed them repeatedly, so that the images appeared distressed and only partially inked. The “Death and Disaster” works are among Warhol’s most famous, and some reside in important institutions.

That’s why the Sotheby’s auction was so anticipated. The real Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) it was kept in the same private European collection for 20 years before going up for sale in 2013, and had a high estimate of $80 million. The painting ended up overcoming that; the record set by the sale stood until 2022, when a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe was sold at auction for $195 million.

It is not clear who bought it Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)but the tenderer of the version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a billionaire played by John Turturro, from big lebowski fame We won’t spoil what happens once John and Jane Smith intercept him, but we’ll leave it at that: the real buyer of Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) probably turned out better.