When the “Saturday Night Live” star appeared in the
first goofy “MacGruber” sketch, he never, in his most deranged dreams,
envisioned his clueless, mullet-headed, bomb-diffusing character at the
center of a big-screen summer action movie.
And he certainly didn’t foresee a scene in said
movie that would require him to be filmed naked on a bitterly frigid
night in a cemetery.
“Yeah, so there I was standing there, with nothing
but a little sock around my genitals,” recalls Forte, 39. “And I’m
adjusting the sock when, suddenly, (“SNL” executive producer)
“I have no idea if he ever sent it to anyone, but if it winds up on the Internet, I’ll know where it came from.”
Forte can thank
that awkward moment. Three years ago, Taccone, an “SNL” writer, pitched
a sketch pegged to a spoof of “MacGyver,” the 1980s TV spy series about
a resourceful secret agent (
Forte’s first reaction? No, thanks.
Recalls Taccone, “He told me, ‘That’s a really dumb
idea,’ which didn’t surprise me at all because it is. But I pestered
him about it for over a month and finally wore him down.”
Forte was just as skeptical last spring when Michaels suggested he huddle with Taccone and fellow “SNL” scribe
full-blown movie. Yes, the “MacGruber” character had gained widespread
popularity via some Pepsi commercials that aired during the 2009 Super
Bowl, but still …
“We thought it was crazy,” Forte says. “But we also
thought it would be stupid not to at least toss around some ideas. We
went off to brainstorm and started getting really excited with what we
came up with.”
Rather than approach the film as an extension of the
sketch, the trio whipped up a tongue-in-cheek R-rated homage to classic
1980s action flicks such as “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard,” crammed
with what Taccone describes as “nudity, sex, violence and gratuitous
cursing.”
“We just whipped up this crazy world and stuck our
crazy character in the middle of it,” says Taccone, who makes his
directorial debut with the film.
Shot on a tight 28-day schedule in
“MacGruber,” which opens Friday, is just one of
several projects being juggled these days by workaholic Forte. In
addition to his “SNL” gig, he provides the voice of Principal Wally on
another comedic film, “A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.” Also, his voice work
can be heard in the video game “Grand Theft Auto IV.”
It all amounts to a surreal experience for a low-key guy who, after attending
followed his father’s career footsteps into a brokerage firm and then
promptly discovered that line of work depressed the heck out of him.
“I think deep down, somewhere inside me, I knew I
wanted to do (comedy). But there was another part of me that thought,
‘You’re crazy. It will never happen,'” says Forte, who as a kid in the
But Forte’s path to big-screen stardom has been a long one. After joining The Groundlings, a
Finally, in 2001, Michaels asked him to audition for
“SNL” and the iconic show has been his home ever since, despite a bad
case of stage fright that plagued him early in his tenure.
Over the years, Forte has proved that he’s willing
to do almost anything to sell a joke. In a recent episode of “30 Rock,”
for example, he played a
“His commitment is so intense,” Taccone says. “If he believes in a joke, he will die for that joke.”
Then again, doing a nude scene in a big-screen
movie, takes things to a whole new level — a level that, Forte admits,
can bring with it certain repercussions.
“I’m a little concerned about my mom taking her
friends to see the movie,” he says. “I dread doing something to destroy
the family name.”
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(c) 2010, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.).
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