Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg Saved Will Forte’s Career After ‘MacGruber’ Crashed and Burned
Thankfully, Will Forte didn’t have to beg some fellow SNL alumni to help him get his career back on track after the failure of MacGruber. We all know what he gets like when he starts begging.
On paper, the 2010 feature film adaptation of a Lorne-Michaels-beloved SNL character had all of the makings of a blockbuster: MacGruber was a movie parody of a TV show that hadn’t been on the air in 18 years at the time of release, a YouTuber who had never shot anything much longer than “I’m on a Boat” wrote and directed the film and, most promisingly, MacGruber was an R-rated comedy that released on the exact same night as the fourth Shrek movie. MacGruber had everything going for it, but, on a $10 million budget, it somehow failed to even hit eight figures at the box office, and it landed near the top of the year-end lists for the worst flops of 2010.
Don't Miss
While MacGruber has since become a cult classic among a very specific cross-section of action-comedy fans and SNL nerds, in the year following its release, star Forte feared that the biggest role of his film career would very well be his last. In a recent conversation with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Forte revealed that, after MacGruber “shit the bed,” Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg and Happy Madison saved his future in film by casting him in their 2012 comedy That’s My Boy, a movie that made the financial disappointment of MacGruber look like Avatar.
“The movie came out and just shit the bed, it just did tremendously badly,” Forte said of MacGruber, which was the directorial debut of The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone. “And it was tough for a couple weeks, and then me and (co-writer) John (Solomon) and Jorma, my other buddies who we all made the movie together, we all just got together and said, ‘You know what? We’re proud of this thing. Eff it.’”
Following the failure of MacGruber, Forte had a crisis of career and made one of the hardest decisions a talented comedian actor can make with the help of his managers and agents. “They said, ‘Look, you can go back to SNL, but you’re not gonna get to make another SNL movie. That’s just not gonna happen. So at some point, you’re gonna have to leave. We think this is probably a good time to leave!’ And I’m like, 'Right after laying a major egg in the movies?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s always gonna be (something), you’re just gonna have to do it at some point.’”
Fresh out of 30 Rock, Forte’s plan was to “see if you can get small supporting parts in comedies and see if you can kinda make your way back up to a point where you could maybe get a kind of a bigger role in a comedy movie,” but, unfortunately for him, the opportunities to pay his dues in other stars’ vehicles didn't come. “I just didn’t do anything for about a year and a half,” Forte explained.
Then, finally, after an extended, involuntary sabbatical, some old friends recruited Forte to join their team. “Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg reached out about being in That's My Boy,” Forte recalled of the 2012 comedy that also failed to even gross its budget with more than five times the funding of MacGruber. “That was a thrill, ‘cause there was part of me that was like, ‘I may never work again!’ Which was fine, ‘cause I love writing, and so I was thinking I could go back and write if I need to. But there was part of me that wanted to act, for sure.”
“That was a big deal when they gave me that job,” Forte said of his performance as Phil in That's My Boy. “That meant a lot, and that gave me a little hope.”
Today, Forte is still a star, and although the comedy movie business is going through its own extended recession, Forte is still popping up in underappreciated comedy movies that no one sees — after all, Coyote vs. Acme will be coming to a balance sheet near you this tax season.
