The Last Man On Earth: surviving the apocalypse, slacker style
Aimless driving. Endless masturbation. Homicidal impulses. This is how you endure the end of the world, says the hit sitcom's star Will Forte – and he's got the Emmy nominations to prove it
Sat 1 Aug 2015 03.59 EDT Last modified on Fri 29 Dec 2017 17.39 EST
Lout of this world: Will Forte as Phil Miller in The Last Man On Earth. Photograph: Jordin Althaus
Will Forte looks like a nice guy. An affable, unassuming, polite, cheerful American everyman. That's his weapon. Orville Willis Forte IV's amiable demeanour is a mask he whipped off countless times during his eight-year run on US sketch institution Saturday Night Live, revealing the white supremacists, sex offenders, crooked politicians and inept alcoholic secret agents lurking underneath. He whips off the mask again in the post-apocalyptic comedy series The Last Man On Earth. This time, revealing the unpleasant individual behind the amiable exterior has won him ritual acclaim and Emmy nominations plural.
The Last Man on Earth: high-concept post-apocalyptic comedy
In The Last Man On Earth, Forte plays Phil Miller, the lone survivor of a super-virus. Despite a straggly mountain-man beard that obscures most of his face save for two weary eyes, Miller seems like a sympathetic individual. Mumbling to himself as he drives aimlessly across the vast, empty expanses of Tucson, Arizona, endlessly masturbating, voiding his bowels in a swimming pool, and conversing with various soccer, snooker and tennis balls with human faces scrawled on them, he's hardly a heroic figure. But it's easy to imagine yourself in his predicament and conclude that – after two years of solitude – you might act just like him.
And then, Phil Miller discovers that he is not quite the last man on Earth. He meets Carol Pilbasian (the great Kristen Schaal) and immediately marries her. Then Melissa Shart (January Jones) turns up and Miller immediately has eyes only for her. The more he's around people the less we like him. He's a liar, a coward and a creep; he's devious, delusional, self-pitying; and he harbours homicidal impulses. "He certainly isn't a perfect person," says Forte.
At any time in US network TV history, an idea like The Last Man On Earth – one that revolves around an unlikable character upon whom indignities are relentlessly heaped – would be a tough sell. "It seemed like it had more of a cable sensibility," agrees Forte. "So we were surprised when Fox [in the US] wanted to do it." That the series attracted an audience, awards attention (Forte received nominations in both the comedy writing and acting categories at the Emmys) and a request for a second series is even more remarkable.
Will Forte interview: 'Playing the straight man in Nebraska was nerve-racking – I never do it'
"I was kind of surprised," admits Forte of his show's success. "Usually, people won't watch stuff I write because I've written it mainly to please myself and is. People tuned in on this one, though, and stuck around. I think they can tell we're not writing it to appeal to as many people as possible."
Forte is the beneficiary of being the creator, star, writer and producer of the sole oddball show in a network comedy environment that is at its least adventurous, most family-pandering, in a decade. NBC, whose comedy roster used to include The Office, Parks And Recreation, 30 Rock and Community, foisted the Emmy-nominated Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt off on Netflix because it had no idea how to market such a challenging concept to its audience. Surrounded by traditional network sitcoms about rambunctious families, The Last Man On Earth (which is exec-produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the team behind 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie) seems almost revolutionary. Visually, it's closer to a road movie than a comedy show. There are no sitcom-style punchlines. The mood is sombre and a little ominous. Rather than each week being its own self-contained story – still the preferred network model – Phil's saga is a continually unfolding serial.
Survival of the fattest: Forte in The Last Man On Earth. Jordin Althaus/FOX
Forte, 44, made his debut as a comedy writer at 17 with a graphic novel called 101 Things To Definitely Not Do If You Want To Get A Chick. His subsequent TV writing career saw him penning jokes for David Letterman, a job he left after just nine months ("I just wasn't that good at it"), and stints as staff writer on That 70s Show and Third Rock From The Sun. Former Saturday Night Live colleague Seth Meyers recalls Forte as being such a perfectionist that he'd "spend an hour talking about where a comma is. I loved working with him. I did not like writing with him." Last Man On Earth marks Forte's graduation to the all-powerful position of showrunner.
How does someone so fastidious balance the demands of churning out a series? "I had no idea how much work it was," he admits. "For a year, I did nothing but this show. It was seven days a week, all day. I took a half-day off at Christmas. New Year was working till 11.50, going to my next-door neighbour's house, coming back at 12.10 and writing a whole lot more. At a certain point, you can't keep that same strict watch over everything. You have to let some stuff go. But I'm for sure an over-thinker."
In the hearts and minds of Saturday Night Live devotees, Forte's 2002-10 run on the show enshrined him as an integral component of a surreally versatile ensemble that included Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg and Fred Armisen. Forte's recollection is different. "It took me probably four years before I could enjoy doing the show. It took a while for me to get comfortable figuring out how to do other people's things. I would just remember what I was like as a writer when other people performed my stuff, and if somebody did it different than I imagined I would think, 'Why is this person ruining my sketch?'"
Sketchy individual: Forte as Saturday Night Live's MacGruber.
Several of the characters Forte brought to the show – Tim Calhoun, a soft-spoken politician who kept inadvertently revealing secrets from his criminal past, Hamilton Whiteman the Aryan, and The Falconer (a guy with a falcon called Donald) – proved to be acquired tastes. "I enjoy a more absurd, weird comedy and it wasn't something always enjoyed by a mass audience. The stuff I do can be offputting to some people but I get pretty stubborn on things and stick to my guns."
The character who ultimately enjoyed the most widespread acceptance was MacGruber, a sketch based on the 80s action show MacGuyver, the mullet-sporting genius who regularly escaped from hazardous situations by inventive use of shoestrings and Coke cans. MacGruber repeatedly failed to defuse a ticking bomb because of his depression, alcoholism, racism, or growing attraction to his grandmother, and was repeatedly blown to pieces.
Forte may claim ignorance of MacGruber's SNL popularity – "I couldn't have told you if people were MacGruber fans or if they were sick of it" – but he is aware of the 2010 movie's small but appreciative cult that reveres the character's long and sweaty sex scene with Kristen Wiig and Val Kilmer's performance as the villainous Cunth. Forte quit SNL to do the film ("I finally got comfortable doing the show and then I left") and subsequently took on a spate of supporting roles, most notably the cross-dressing Paul on 30 Rock.
Going straight: Forte as David Grant in Alexander Payne's Nebraska.
The sentence "comic actor makes a rare dramatic turn" generally inspires a sharp intake of breath and unwelcome reminders of Jim Carrey in The Majestic or Ben Stiller in The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. However, in 2013, Will Forte the comic actor made a rare dramatic turn in the well-received, Oscar-nominated Alexander Payne film Nebraska, as Bruce Dern's dutiful son. His first rare dramatic turn had in fact been in the little-seen Irish movie Run & Jump, in which Forte played an American doctor lodging with Maxine Peake's dysfunctional family. "At the end of the second week, I was writing home saying: 'I should never have agreed to do this movie, I'm doing a horrible job and I'm sure they're all disappointed in me.' It took a while to get used to that level of vulnerability. Steph Green, who directed Run & Jump, she really taught me how to be a dramatic actor and then getting to do it with Alexander Payne was like a graduate school."
In comedy, Forte plays against his looks: he's the fruitloop behind the aw-shucks nice guy. In both his dramatic roles, he digs deeper into what Payne describes as his "magnificent recognisability. He's like a buddy of yours that you bump into at the mall." I wonder what it must be like to relinquish the comfort of the comedy tools that served him so well for so long and play average guys without quirks and tics.
"You do sketch comedy and you do the big, broad characters and you do a bunch of really crazy things that seem like they take a lot of nerve to do but, for sure, the hardest thing I ever did was to play someone close to who I really am," he admits. "You just feel so vulnerable. When you do a sketch character, you get to hide behind your wig and moustache." He leaves a pause that gives the impression he's still thinking about the vulnerability required for serious drama. Then I hear him laughing to himself: "I love wearing moustaches."
The Last Man On Earth begins 10 Aug, 9pm, Dave
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