A reporter, a photographer and a TV star walked into Max Karaoke Studio on Sawtelle Boulevard. The place didn’t serve alcohol, and so the reporter, who had booked a private room for the evening, had a pint bottle of whiskey concealed in a jacket pocket.
“I’ve been here before,” said Will Forte, 45, the star and co-creator of “The Last Man on Earth,” a postapocalyptic half-hour comedy on Fox. “My karaoke partner is always Jason Sudeikis, and we come here, to this very room. I can still smell him.”
The two friends, former “Saturday Night Live” cast members, play brothers on Mr. Forte’s show, which is now in its second season and returns Sunday, after a 12-week break. “Basically, the last year of my life has been waking up, going straight into work and then going home to bed,” Mr. Forte said.
Also present was David Noel, a writer on “The Last Man on Earth.” Mr. Noel’s fiancée, the model, actress and singer Alanna Vicente, stopped by with 10 cold cans of Asahi beer.
After getting settled, Mr. Forte dimmed the lights and made his first selection: the Merle Haggard song “Mama Tried.” He took a sip of whiskey and sang it with a slight Oklahoma twang. Next, he gave his all to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
“It’s going to seem like I’m a huge country guy,” he said. “Black Sabbath will be next.”
‘Strange Days’
During the eight years he spent as a performer and writer on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Forte did a lot of karaoke with his cast mates.
“It’s really less about the quality of your singing and more about your passion,” he said. He punched in the numbers for Black Sabbath’s “Fairies Wear Boots.” After the lengthy guitar intro, he started howling.
“It’s so therapeutic to do this,” he said. “Black Sabbath is wonderful.”
When he sang “Strange Days,” by the Doors, his voice was a deep drone. During the final verse, Mr. Forte seemed to inhabit Jim Morrison, and the mood turned eerie.
In the hush that fell on the room after the song was over, he said: “My dad had some Doors tapes. To me, Jim Morrison had all this mystery around him. It’s weird to think that I’m about closing in on double his age.”
The reporter asked him if he felt 45.
“Mentally, I don’t,” Mr. Forte said. “Physically, I definitely feel more aches and pains than I used to. My bedroom is on the second story of the house, and it’s harder and harder to walk down those stairs. A lot of times I’ll walk down backward.”
Mr. Forte has spoken publicly of his obsessive-compulsive-like tendencies.
“It depends on how tired I am,” he said. “I still check the showers and stuff like that. For me, it used to be mainly about checking the sinks, in weird patterns, and the stove. I’ve gotten better about that.”
Ms. Vicente said she has known Mr. Forte for eight years. She described him as a sweetheart, but complicated.
“I’m this weird mixture of confident and superfragile,” Mr. Forte said.
‘Touch and Go’
Orville Willis Forte IV (his full name) said he had a happy upbringing in the Northern California towns of Moraga and Lafayette. He got along with his parents. His mother was a teacher and artist, his father a financial broker who became a ski bum.
During Mr. Forte’s freshman year of high school, he was class president. In senior year, his class voted him Best Personality. The only time he got in any real trouble came when he served as the unwitting getaway driver for friends of friends who had squirted ketchup all over a Jack in the Box.
“I am not into that,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Somebody’s going to have to clean this up.’ It bummed me out.”
Someone noted his license plate number as he drove off. When he got home, the police were waiting. They took him to the station for questioning.
“I said I didn’t know who was in my car,” Mr. Forte said. “And it was kind of the truth. I didn’t know those people’s names, so it was very easy to say, ‘I don’t know them.’ And he’s like, ‘They were in the back of your car!’ They spent all night trying. My mom was there, saying, ‘Just tell them the names of these people.’ And I never said anything.”
At the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Forte joined a fraternity and majored in history. After graduation, he went to work in finance, but it wasn’t a fit.
In 1995, he wrote a humor book, “101 Things to Definitely Not Do if You Want to Get a Chick,” which led to a job at the “Late Show With David Letterman.”
During his first week, staff members were asked to list their stupid talents. Mr. Forte’s was cutting his own hair, and he showed off his talent in an on-air segment that ended with him pretending to stab Mr. Letterman’s hand with the scissors. “It was the scariest thing,” he said. “I was terrified that I was going to go too far and stab him.”
Mr. Forte left the show after nine months and ended up writing for “3rd Rock From the Sun” and “That ’70s Show.” He took classes with the Los Angeles sketch troupe the Groundlings before joining it in 2000. Lorne Michaels was in the audience on a night when Mr. Forte slayed.
For his “Saturday Night Live” audition, Mr. Forte did impressions of Martin Sheen and Joni Mitchell. He also portrayed a gold-painted human statue who sings an X-rated song detailing how he paid for body paint. He got the job, only to turn it down. A fear of failure went into the decision, Mr. Forte said, and he had regrets about it.
When Will Ferrell departed from “Saturday Night Live” in 2002, Mr. Forte left his writing job in Los Angeles and accepted a second offer to join the show. Many of his oddball sketches aired at 12:50 a.m., and he said he didn’t feel confident until his seventh season.
He was into pranks during his time at the show’s studio in Rockefeller Center. Every workday for a full season, for instance, he blasted the bombastic Emerson, Lake and Powell song “Touch and Go” from his office. Colleagues begged him to stop, to no avail.
“I think I drove myself crazy a little bit,” Mr. Forte said. “But it’s a great song. It was kind of a fun backdrop to writing. I don’t know, I can eat the same meal every day for months. I have no problem with repetition.”
‘Superstar’
One sketch that took off was “MacGruber,” a moronic-on-purpose parody of the action series “MacGyver.” Originally pitched by the writer Jorma Taccone, it became a “Saturday Night Live” staple, and Mr. Michaels co-produced a 2010 movie version, written by Mr. Taccone, John Solomon and Mr. Forte. His mother, who had a bit part, was on the set on the day he filmed a scene wearing nothing but a celery stalk.
The movie tanked. But when Mr. Forte was a guest on “Late Show With David Letterman” to promote the film, he was heartened to find that his old boss seemed to approve. “That was one of the most exciting things,” he said. “Dave loved ‘MacGruber.’” Now that it has something of a cult following, Mr. Forte said he is trying to put together a sequel.
Mr. Forte left “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. “I was proud of the stuff I did there, but there was no reason for me to think that I would ever have a major acting career,” he said. “I left thinking, ‘If nothing happens, I’ll just go back to writing.’”
His agents persuaded him to send an audition tape to the director Alexander Payne, who asked to see him in person and gave him a prime role in “Nebraska.” Critics noticed he was more than a clown. “I got very lucky,” Mr. Forte said.
Around that time, the actor Val Kilmer, who played the villain in “MacGruber,” asked Mr. Forte if he could stay at his house while he looked for a new place. Soon, his assistant showed up, carrying two large duffel bags filled with books. Mr. Forte and Mr. Kilmer ended up being roommates for two months.
“I can’t say enough good things about Val,” Mr. Forte said. “He is a delight. I’d come home and think nobody was home, because it was completely dark. Then I would see a little light coming out of his bedroom, and he’d be reading with a little miner’s lamp on his head.”
In 2013, Mr. Forte and the writing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who made “The Lego Movie,” got serious about “The Last Man on Earth.” The premise was not the usual sitcom fare: In the first episode, the protagonist seems to be the lone survivor of a pandemic.
He goes feral. He uses a swimming pool as a toilet and bathes in tequila. When he finally meets up with other survivors, he has trouble reconciling himself to civilized life.
Mr. Forte resisted the suggestion that “The Last Man on Earth” suits the current sociopolitical climate, which seems to have doomsday in the air. “We’re just making a comedy show,” he said.
As if to avoid additional questions on the show’s themes, he grabbed the microphone and started singing “Help Me” by Joni Mitchell. It lay beyond his vocal range, but he fought gamely to the end.
By GEORGE GURLEY
Source New York Times
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