Sketch-comedy masters play it mostly straight on Forever
Armisen and Rudolph, of SNL fame, are going for more serious laughs
MALIBU, CALIF.— During their lengthy runs on Saturday Night
Live, Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen created some of the sketch comedy show’s most outrageous characters.
Rudolph’s more memorable impersonations included a (very) platinum blond Donatella Versace mangling the English language, Maya Angelou pranking Cornel West, and Oprah Winfrey making sweet, sweet love to a loaf of French bread. Armisen, meanwhile, performed comically lousy renditions of Hanukkah tunes; gave unwelcome sex advice, as Queen Elizabeth, to Kate Middleton; and played hot potato with the decapitated head of a prep schoolboy. The two also performed together in several recurring sketches, channelling Beyoncé and Prince, Barack and Michelle Obama and the linguistically challenged art dealers Nuni and Nuni Schoener.
Now, more than a decade after Rudolph left the show, and five years since Armisen’s departure, they are back together, in the new Amazon Prime Video comedy Forever, which debuts Sept. 14. But this time, they are playing a relatively normal married couple who argue about fork tines.
Their new show is written and produced by Emmy-winning writers Alan Yang ( Master of None) and Matt Hubbard ( 30 Rock), signals a big leap from the pair’s sketch-comedy roots. Instead of playing a multitude of outlandish characters, the two play a single character each in a comedy capped at eight episodes.
“Alan said it was the first time he did a show that had an ending, where he knew where it was going,” Rudolph said. “That was a huge light bulb for Fred and myself. We both said, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’ ”
The show began coming together in March 2017, when Armisen and Rudolph approached Yang. Armisen was wrapping up his sketch series Portlandia; Rudolph was coming off her short-lived variety series with Martin Short, Maya & Marty. And they had always shared a desire to do another show together. “I remember Fred reminding me, weren’t we going to do a show where we played monsters or something?” Rudolph said.
Armisen is Oscar, a dentist in Riverside, Calif., Yang’s hometown. June, Rudolph’s character, works at a shady timeshare company when she isn’t chickening out of trying to find something better. “I think we thought it would be fun to take two people who are unbelievably good at playing anybody, and have them play a relatively normcore couple in Riverside,” Hubbard said.
Armisen and Rudolph were drawn to the series’ unusual story arc, which includes a series of life-changing moments early into the eight-episode run, and the chance to play a pair of characters who grow and change over time. “They’re happy, and from the outside, I think everyone sees a loving relationship,” Rudolph said. “But with June, she’s always wondering, what else is out there?”
Catherine Keener, who plays Kase, a free spirit who comes between the two, worked with Rudolph in the 2017 film We Don’t Belong Here but had never worked with Armisen before. “Individually they’re both bril- liant, but they’re another thing when they’re together,” she said. “You can almost see it, this thing, like they’re in this little pocket together. Everyone would stand around and just watch them.”
The series has offered both Rudolph and Armisen a chance to bust out of the sketch-comedy bubble. “I never thought when I started out that being in comedy would mean being limited to comedy,” she said. “But very quickly, when you demonstrate you can be funny, people label you as a comedian, and they don’t like it when you go outside of that box.”