Will Forte is the king of second chances, whether it was getting another shot at Saturday Night Live after turning down Lorne Michaels or reviving his now-iconic character MacGruber on Peacock after the 2010 movie bombed at the box office.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Forte breaks down how he overcame his SNL fears to deliver some of the show’s weirdest and funniest sketches and shares behind-the-scenes details of MacGruber’s full journey from one-off sketch to cult classic. He also opens up about his regrets around replacing Will Ferrell as George W. Bush on SNL and shares stories from filming his hilarious cameo on kindred spirit Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave and that time he ended up on a private jet with comedy hero Steve Martin.
The 51-year-old comedian became a dad for the first time last February and reveals in this interview that he and wife Olivia Modling are expecting their second child this fall. “I definitely will hear people say, ‘Oh, I want to do things that my kids can see,’” he says when I ask how fatherhood has affected his creative ambitions. “But the very first thing that I did after having a baby was MacGruber.”
The outrageously profane and violently buffoonish character made its first appearance on SNL in 2007, during Forte’s sixth season in the cast. He tells me he “came very close to being let go from the show” after an unfortunate attempt to succeed Will Ferrell as George W. Bush.
“The thing I liked the least was doing those George W. Bush cold opens,” Forte says. “I don’t do impersonations and I just did not know how to do that. I wasn’t comfortable yet performing but I wanted to be a team player.” He now considers those sketches a “very public failing” and wishes he could “go back and have another crack at it” with the “looseness” he has been able to find on screen in more recent years.
The biggest “bummer,” he explains, is that because he was already being featured at the top of the show, it gave Lorne Michaels and the writers license to cut the weirder sketches he actually wanted to be putting up in the “10-to-1” slot toward the end of the night. “Those wouldn’t make it in the show because it was like, ‘Oh, Will’s already covered, he’s got his Bush,’” he explains.
He remembers Michaels calling him personally that summer and saying, “I was having a tough time figuring out what to do with you” before ultimately deciding to give him what the comedian describes now as a “new lease on life.”
Co-written by Forte’s longtime writing partner John Solomon and The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, MacGruber started as a one-off MacGyver parody before ultimately evolving into a recurring sketch, Super Bowl commercial, financially disappointing-but-beloved movie, and now an eight-episode series on Peacock.
Forte tells me he’s “still waiting to hear” about a second season, but considers everything that followed that first sketch icing on the cake.
“We never thought we’d do a second sketch,” he says. “So this whole thing has just been this unexpected wild ride. Getting to make a MacGruber series after the whole—‘journey’ sounds douchey—but after that whole journey, it was a very special thing to get to hang out with all these old friends and get to just laugh again. So yeah, if we get another chance to get the group together and have fun, we would jump in it. But we’re pretty thankful to have gotten this experience. It was long sought-after but hardly expected.”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing—including a recreation of his two SNL auditions, what it was like returning to host the show for the first time this year and a lot more—by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
I was surprised to learn that MacGruber was not your original creation at the beginning, right?
Right, right, no. In fact, we fought it! John Solomon and I had become friends with Jorma [Taccone] and we would always just enjoy hanging out with him, so we started writing things every couple weeks. And [Taccone] said he had this idea for MacGruber, who was MacGyver’s less talented brother. We just didn’t have any kind of reaction to it, so we said, ‘Well, let’s try something else this week, we can think about it.” And every week, when we’d get together to write something, he would keep pitching it. Finally, just to get him to stop pitching it, we decided to take a crack at it. So the three of us wrote that first one together and it went well at the table read. But I’m still kind of baffled by it. I mean, now it’s something that I love with all my heart and is so fun. But back then, I remember thinking, “This is fine.” And I remember the audience seemed to react better than I thought they would, but it wasn’t like I Love Lucy laughs.
What was funny to you about MacGruber at first?
Honestly, I don’t know. Because in the beginning, the very first one, MacGruber didn’t have a huge personality, it was more just the idea of it. We got to the end of it at the show and people seemed to like it, but I don’t think any of us said, “Oh, we have to do another one of those!”
You didn’t see it as a recurring sketch?
No. I think we were like, “Oh, that went better than we thought,” but then just kind of moved on. And then after doing the second one, the second one seemed to go pretty well, and then we started thinking about if there are opportunities to do another one. And at a certain point, it became a thing that Lorne was asking for us to do. And that’s always trickier. When you’re on your own time, you can wait for a good idea to come, but then when he’s like, “I want a MacGruber this week,” then you have to figure out what you want to do. But it was also very exciting to have Lorne want it. And I think usually we were pretty happy with how things turned out, but sometimes it just took forever to figure out a premise.
So then it has just ballooned and ballooned from where it started and you did the Super Bowl commercial and then obviously that led to the movie in 2010.
I forget who it was, but somebody approached Lorne and said, “Hey, would you ever think about a MacGruber movie?” And then Lorne called us in and asked us, “What do you think?” And we were like, “Can we think about it?” Because we never had thought about that. And then we took a night and we were like, “Why not? Yeah, let’s do it!” And then we got very excited about it and even had a couple ideas and then the next day we go in and we’re like, “Yes, we want to do it!” And then whoever had approached him very quickly got cold feet. But Lorne was like, “We’re doing this thing.” And he just made it happen. He is just a force.
Well, I mean the movie is incredible and has gone on to be beloved by so many people. But it did not have that reaction when it came out. You made this thing that you loved and that so many people love and yet there’s this reaction from the mainstream that wasn’t so great. So how did that affect you at the time, and how do you think about it now?
Well, I think at the time it was very hard. It was very, very hard—especially the first couple weeks. But I was used to being in bombs. It was my comfort zone, in a way. But the thing I’ll say about it is, there’s such a different experience when you get to make something where you love it and believe in it and it does poorly. It’s way easier to take it than if you alter stuff to try to please other people. It’s harder when something goes really poorly in that situation, because you always have that feeling of like, “If I got to make it exactly the way I wanted, things would have been different.” And at least with MacGruber, we got that experience where it’s like, “You know what? We wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte as MacGruber on Jan. 22.
NBC via GettyOnce we make it, you just give it up to the world and they either accept it or not. And out of the gate, they didn’t accept it. And that was tough for a couple weeks. And then we kind of huddled around and had a phone call and we were like, “Fuck it! We’re proud of this and we wouldn’t have done anything different. Let’s not let this sully our feelings towards this thing, which we loved making, we loved how it turned out.” And it was right around that period that we were like, “You know what? Let’s make another one.” So that was our goal. We were like, at some point, even if we have to make it on our phones, let’s not let this be the end of it.
Well, it took a while, but you got there.
It did take a while for sure. It took a long time. Everything moves so slowly and then it moves so fast. You’re just sitting there waiting and waiting and then all of a sudden it’s a sprint. But it was such a fun experience getting to do this again. Even though this was something we had been hoping for for so long, at a certain point you just think it’s never going to happen. So to actually do it was a dream come true.
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
