Six years in the past, Will Forte was wrapping work on a horror indie in Ireland when he discovered that The Last Man on Earth—the Emmy-nominated Fox sitcom he created, produced, and starred in for 4 seasons—was not being picked up for extra episodes.
For some, the information would possibly’ve been a blow to the ego or coronary heart. But for the Saturday Night Live alum, it was what he had been secretly wishing for.
“As much fun as I was having with people, and as much as I loved everybody, there was a good part of me that was just praying for it to end every year because I couldn’t handle it physically and emotionally,” says the actor in a telephone name from Dublin, the place he was set to attend a particular screening of his new Netflix collection, Bodkin.
By 2015, the yr that The Last Man on Earth premiered, Forte had expertise as a author (Late Show With David Letterman, third Rock From the Sun, many an MTV Movie Awards present), a performer (he did eight seasons on SNL), and an enthusiastically inept MacGyver sort (named MacGruber, an SNL character who bought a 2010 spin-off film and would later land an eight-episode Peacock collection). But Forte discovered himself out of his depth on The Last Man on Earth, juggling a number of jobs on a present whose postapocalyptic conceit meant he would have minimal costars.
“I thought, Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord] and I came up with this idea together. Of course I’ll do that—without having any idea how much work it was,” says Forte. “I’m a little bit of a control freak. After the first year, I delegated better. I would have this amazing team of writers that were there, and these great editors. But I just took on too much…It was pretty overwhelming. I agreed with myself, I’ll never do this again in this way, but I’m going to gut it out and see it through until it’s canceled…. It was tough.”
When the cancellation got here in 2018, says Forte, “there was a lot of relief, and I thought, Okay, now I can resume life again. Days after finding out, I was in a van driving solo through the countryside of Ireland. It was a very powerful thing—being in this car, driving the wild Atlantic way, sorting out things, feeling this freedom, listening to my tunes, driving on this magical land. It was really very healing.”
The expertise, plus different extraordinary journeys to Ireland earlier than and since, imbued Forte with such a deep and abiding love for the nation that, when he heard there was an element for him in Netflix’s Ireland-set thriller thriller Bodkin, his first thought was, “It’s going to have to be really bad for me to not do it…. The real entry point for me was just saying the word Ireland.” (Forte, who appears compulsively well mannered, rapidly factors out that the scripts for Bodkin ended up being “fantastic.”)