Will Forte is one of the only comedians to ever turn down an initial offer from Lorne Michaels to join Saturday Night Live. But after three years in the cast, he found himself at a crossroads on the show.
In his return to The Last Laugh podcast, Forte discusses the huge second chance that Michaels gave him after coming closer than anyone knew to cutting him loose.
The star of two Netflix series this year—Haunted Hotel and The Four Seasons—also talks about his love of animation and playing the husband of his former SNL boss Tina Fey. And Forte shares updates on the unlikely fate of his canceled and then resurrected Coyote vs. Acme movie, reveals the potential for a MacGruber sequel, and shares behind-the-scenes stories from his wild night at the SNL50 anniversary special.
“I love doing things that are a little more absurd, to literally be able to be cartoony,” Forte says of his animation voiceover work, which has also included shows like The Great North and HouseBroken. He especially appreciates cartoons, like Haunted Hotel, that actually “take advantage” of the fact that you can do anything in animation.
“It’s stuff that would cost like a billion dollars to try to do in a live action setting,” he says of the new series, created by Matt Roller, a writer who got his start working on Rick and Morty. “I love this show,” Forte adds. “It’s got a lot of fun horror elements, but it’s also really funny, and there is some pretty sweet grounded stuff too.”
That injection of heart into humor is very much on display as well in Forte’s other Netflix show The Four Seasons, in which he plays a middle-aged dad that feels closer to his real self than anything else he has portrayed on screen. But it has not always been present in his more outrageous comedy—including his disturbingly racist Hamilton Whiteman SNL character who has become something of a fan favorite in the years since he left the show in 2010.
With his signature blonde bob and dark sunglasses, Hamilton was known for injecting comments about the “great mistake” of electing a Black man as president in wedding toasts and funeral speeches. And Forte infamously brought the character into the real world to roast his cast mates Seth Meyers and Andy Samberg at their respective nuptials.
“I don’t think I said anything that would get me canceled,” Forte says of those private speeches. “But this character is not a good dude, and it is obviously not me saying, this is how I feel.” He says he would probably still do the character on SNL today, but would be much more aware of the fact that the ideology he was espousing has now, “sadly,” entered the mainstream of American politics. “There would be part of me that wouldn’t want anybody to even have the chance to mistake it” as endorsing those beliefs, he adds.
Hamilton was just one of many gonzo characters Forte embodied over the course of his eight seasons during what Meyers has dubbed “an golden era” of SNL, including the Falconer, MacGruber and others. But as he details in our conversation, his time at the show was very nearly cut short after his third season when Lorne Michaels pulled him aside and told him to get his act together.
During the summer of 2005, Forte’s contract was put on hold as Michaels added three new heavy-hitters to the cast: Samberg, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig. As the show was “trying to figure out what the heck to do,” in Forte’s words, they left him hanging longer than anyone else. “I was the very last person they brought back,” Forte says. “All my friends are getting asked to come back to the show, and, and I was the final one, so I got really lucky.”
Towards the end of that summer, Michaels called Forte directly and told him he was “having a hard time” with the decision because, as he put it, “when you act in your own things, you commit a hundred percent, but when you do other people’s things, you’re thinking about pleasing them, and you need to take ownership of that stuff in the same way that you take ownership of your stuff.”
“And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s bulls–t!’” Forte remembers thinking. “And man, I look back now, and he was so dead on.”
When Michaels ultimately decided to bring him back, Forte says, “That could have either made me shrink and, and go like, oh, man, I’m nervous about everything. But it did the opposite, and it just made me go, I get a chance to come back here? F— it. Let’s go for it a hundred percent.”
Reflecting on that potential turning point in his career, Forte asks, “Who knows what would’ve happened had I not come back? But thank god I did. And he was right to call me out on that. And I thank him for it. I think it not only helped me at the show, but it helped me in other projects too.”
That was certainly true for MacGruber, a character that Forte resisted playing at first but ultimately became his most iconic creation at the show during his final years there. That unhinged MacGyver parody became a Super Bowl commercial for Pepsi, a feature-length movie co-starring Val Kilmer during Forte’s last season at the show, and then an eight-episode Peacock series 11 years after that.
But Forte is quick to shoot down the possibility of a movie sequel—despite the fact that “MacGruber 2” is still listed on his IMDb page—while still holding out a shred of hope.
“No, that is not real,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, look, if I could, I would do MacGruber all the time. So if somebody gave us an opportunity to somehow do another MacGruber, I would jump at it so quickly.”
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