Will Forte, the SNL alum whose buried projects keep coming back to life

Will Forte

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 17, 1970 Alameda, California, United States
Occupation	Actor, comedian and screenwriter
Known for	The Lego Movie, 22 Jump Street, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Awards	National Board of Review

Will Forte’s biggest screen moment this year is a cartoon lawsuit that its own studio once tried to erase. In Coyote vs. Acme he plays Kevin Avery, a down-on-his-luck billboard attorney hired by Wile E. Coyote to sue the company whose rockets and anvils kept failing him. Warner Bros. Discovery finished the film and then decided it was worth more as a tax write-off than as a release. It reached cinemas anyway, through a small distributor, and opened second in North America behind a Spider-Man film.

That shape, the buried thing that refuses to stay buried, runs through Forte’s career with odd consistency. His comedy is built on men who are certain of themselves and wrong about nearly everything: an action hero whose sketches ended in the explosion he was supposed to prevent, or a survivor of a global virus who paints “Alive in Tucson” signs across America and then gets himself banished from Tucson. Several of the projects built around those men looked like failures on arrival. Most of them came back.

The name on his birth certificate is Orville Willis Forte IV. He arrived in Alameda, California, on 17 June 1970, and grew up across the hills in Moraga and then Lafayette. He studied history at UCLA, then followed his father into finance as a broker at Smith Barney Shearson and found the job hollow. The exit ran through The Groundlings, the Los Angeles improv school, where he took classes and eventually performed in the Main Company.

Before anyone knew his face, Forte was a writer for hire. Roughly nine months on Late Show with David Letterman brought him a first Emmy nomination, for writing, in 1998. Sitcom rooms followed at 3rd Rock from the Sun and That ’70s Show. In 2002 he moved in front of the camera and joined the cast of Saturday Night Live.

He stayed eight seasons and 157 episodes, until 2010, and his characters lived at the odd end of the show. There was Tim Calhoun, a jittery political candidate, and the Falconer, a man whose survival depended entirely on a bird. The character that lasted was MacGruber, a parody of the television hero MacGyver whose sketches tended to end with the bomb going off.

Turning MacGruber into a feature was the first big bet, and it lost. MacGruber, directed by Jorma Taccone and starring Forte with Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer, cost $10 million and earned $9.3 million worldwide. By its third week its screen count had collapsed from 2,546 to 177 and Universal pulled it. A decade later it had become a cult film, enough of one that Peacock ordered a MacGruber series, which premiered in December 2021 with Forte back in the mullet.

The correction to the SNL image came from Alexander Payne. In Nebraska, shot in black and white, Forte plays David Grant, the younger son who agrees to drive his father, Bruce Dern’s Woody, to Lincoln to claim a sweepstakes prize that exists only in a marketing letter. Forte plays it straight, with the patience of a man who has stopped trying to win arguments with his family. The film competed at Cannes in 2013; the National Board of Review named him best supporting actor and he picked up an Independent Spirit nomination.

He spent that credibility on something stranger. The Last Man on Earth, which Forte created, wrote, ran in its first season and starred in, premiered on Fox in March 2015 with a pilot directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Phil Miller believes he is the only person left in the United States, and once he discovers he is not, he behaves worse. Forte described him as “a selfish person who sometimes borders on being a flat-out sociopath.” The show brought him three Emmy nominations, two as lead actor and one for writing.

The ledger has a less flattering side. Some critics argued that the show’s appeal thinned after its pilot, and Fox cancelled it in May 2018, days after a cliffhanger written for a fifth season that never came. Forte holds five Primetime Emmy nominations and no wins. Outside Nebraska, his film work has mostly served other people’s vehicles, from a parent in Booksmart to the incompetent contractor Keegan in Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner, which critics dismissed this spring and which grossed less than it cost. His commitment to playing the fool is total, and the industry has often taken him at his word.

The roles that complicate that picture tend to be the quieter ones. In A Futile and Stupid Gesture he played Doug Kenney, the National Lampoon co-founder whose comic success never protected him from himself. He voiced Shaggy in Scoob! and Wolf, the eldest Tobin son, across 97 episodes of the animated The Great North. In Bodkin on Netflix he was Gilbert Power, an American podcaster who lands in a West Cork town to investigate three people who vanished during a Samhain celebration years earlier.

The present is busier than at any point since SNL. In The Four Seasons, Tina Fey‘s Netflix series adapted from Alan Alda’s 1981 film, he plays Jack, an anxious schoolteacher married to Fey’s Kate; the second season, released on 28 May 2026, took the friends as far as Italy. In the Australian series Sunny Nights, on Stan since 26 December 2025 and on Hulu since March, he and D’Arcy Carden play American siblings who open a spray-tan business in Sydney and fall in with its criminal underworld.

Coyote vs. Acme is the story that suits him best. Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the finished film in November 2023. In February 2024, after seeing the final cut, Forte wrote to the cast and crew: “I know that a lot of you haven’t gotten a chance to see our movie.” Ketchup Entertainment bought it in March 2025 and released it on 28 August 2026, to reviews running above 90 per cent positive on Rotten Tomatoes and an A CinemaScore from audiences.

He married Olivia Modling on 31 July 2021 in a last-minute ceremony in the backyard of Jorma Taccone’s house near Albuquerque, where he was shooting the MacGruber series. Their first daughter, Zoe, was born in February 2021; a second, Cecilia, followed.

What comes next is already partly written. Netflix renewed The Four Seasons in June for an eight-episode third season, with Reykjavík among its locations. In July, Deadline reported that Forte was in talks to join Goblin, a puppet comedy written and directed by David Mikalson for A24, alongside Skyler Gisondo and Kenneth Branagh. For an actor whose best-known men are wrong about almost everything, Jack, the worrier, may be the first one who turns out to be right.

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Tags: actors, Will Forte, Tina Fey, Alexander Payne, The Four Seasons, Nebraska

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