Forte glad he pursued funniness, not finance
It was the end of the fourth season of his TV series “The Last Man on Earth,” and Will Forte didn’t yet know the show was going to be canceled. He thought it was just on another hiatus. And he wanted to spend this downtime on vacation in Ireland, not at work. So, when the script for “Extra Ordinary” crossed his desk, it was an automatic pass.
“I was 100% against doing anything during that break, workwise,” Forte says during a recent phone call. “I just wanted to go and relax.”
The universe had other plans for Forte.
Before the vacation started, he decided to look at that script, paying attention to the role of Christian Winter, a hasbeen American rock star living in the Emerald Isle that Forte was being asked to play. The character’s one hit long in his rearview mirror, Winter resorts to a deal with the devil to refresh his faded career, only to lock horns with ghostbusting driving instructor Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins) and her latest client, Martin Martin (Barry Ward), a sadsack widower with a unique supernatural gift.
“When I read the script, I just thought, ‘I’ve got to do this thing.’ It’s so fun, so different. I got to go over and meet a bunch of really wonderful, fun new people.”
“Extra Ordinary” screens Sunday, Feb. 16, as part of the Irish Spotlight at San Francis
co’s Mostly British Film Festival with the Lafayetteraised Forte on hand for a questionandanswer session.
“It was very, very fun,” Forte says of the filming experience. “For some reason, it’s easy for me to relate to playing a washedup anything. It just kind of feels appropriate for my lifestyle for some reason — what a mean thing to say about myself.”
“Extra Ordinary” is just the latest chapter in a busy, eventful career. After getting his start as a writer on such things as “The Jenny McCarthy Show” and “The Late Show With David Letterman,” where he penned jokes for one of his boyhood idols, Forte, 49, got his big break as a performer when he joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 2002.
Forte stayed with “SNL” through the 2010 season, and despite the selfdeprecating joke about identifying with a washedup performer, it is hard to imagine that fate befalling him. He has worked steadily, sometimes making his own opportunities, as when he brought one of his “SNL” characters to the big screen in “MacGruber” or when he created “The Last Man on Earth.” And he is clearly in demand. In the last year alone, Forte appeared in a small role in “The Laundromat” and had more substantial parts in “Booksmart” and “Goodboys.” He’s the voice of Shaggy in the upcoming bigscreen ScoobyDoo movie “Scoob!” and he’s starring in a comedy series, “Flipped,” for Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new Quibi streaming service.
What’s remarkable about all of this is it is not the path Forte set for himself. He has always loved comedy, growing up in thrall to Letterman and “Saturday Night Live” — “the whole institution,” while offering special admiration for the original “Not Ready for Prime Time” cast that included John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, whom he would later get to write for on “Third Rock From the Sun.” He also loved the Kids in the Hall, Monty Python, Peter Sellers and Martin Short, and he allows that Steve Martin was his overall comedy hero. But that was not the path Forte was on.
At Acalanes High School, he was the freshman class president. He was on the football and swim teams. “I was not a great swimmer,” he says with a laugh. As a sophomore, he took a single drama class from Acalanes’ renowned teacher Tom “Egg” Eggertsen. But while he took part in the school’s monologue night, Forte wasn’t in any plays.
“I did cohost the talent show my senior year of high school,” Forte says. “But it was more like we just ripped off a bunch of David Lettermantype weird things. We threw cheese to the audience . ... So, we were just weirdos and jumped around the stage. That was it. That was the extent of it.”
Forte’s talent for writing and performing wouldn’t assert itself until later. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in history, he followed his father’s footsteps into the world of finance. He got a job as a cold caller, setting up sales calls, but at the point when he needed to decide whether to take the test to become a broker, he knew his heart wasn’t in it.
“There was an open audition for a commercial in college for Mars bars,” Forte says. “And I went and I somehow got that audition and made this Mars bar commercial. And wound up on the cuttingroom floor.
“And then, my buddy went to a CocaCola audition. And for his callback, they said, ‘Bring a couple of friends and just mess around in front of us.’ So we just went and were acting like idiots in front of these people and I got that job. So to me it was like, ‘Oh, this is super easy. Why don’t I just be an actor?’ I had a 100% success rate for these commercials. And yeah, I was such a huge fan of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Letterman. I just thought, ‘God, I might as well see if I can make some kind of headway in this business.’ Never really thinking that it would work out, but it just seemed like such a fun way to make a living.”
Though he now makes his home in Southern California, Forte still thinks of the Bay Area as the best place on Earth and loves to visit. He expects a lot of his family will join him at the screening of “Extra Ordinary.” And “extraordinary” may be the best word to sum up Forte’s career.
“I don’t do a lot of reflection often, but when I look back, I do feel very blessed,” Forte says. “I got a chance to, right out of the gate, work for my comedy heroes at ‘Saturday Night Live’ and work with Letterman. So if I never got a job after that, how lucky would I have been, just to stop right there.”