Six years ago, Will Forte was wrapping work on a horror indie in Ireland when he learned that The Last Man on Earth—the Emmy-nominated Fox sitcom he created, produced, and starred in for four seasons—was not being picked up for more episodes.
For some, the news might’ve been a blow to the ego or 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 phone call from Dublin, where he was set to attend a special screening of his new Netflix series, Bodkin.
By 2015, the year that The Last Man on Earth premiered, Forte had experience as a writer (Late Show With David Letterman, 3rd Rock From the Sun, many an MTV Movie Awards show), a performer (he did eight seasons on SNL), and an enthusiastically inept MacGyver type (named MacGruber, an SNL character who got a 2010 spin-off movie and would later land an eight-episode Peacock series). But Forte found himself out of his depth on The Last Man on Earth, juggling multiple jobs on a show 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 came 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 experience, plus other extraordinary trips to Ireland before and since, imbued Forte with such a deep and abiding love for the country that, when he heard there was a part for him in Netflix’s Ireland-set mystery 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 seems compulsively polite, quickly points out that the scripts for Bodkin ended up being “fantastic.”)
In Bodkin, Forte plays an American true-crime podcaster named Gilbert who joins forces with a local Irish journalist (Siobhán Cullen) and a research assistant (Robyn Cara) to solve a mystery in which they become entangled. The show, like the podcast its characters are making, scratches the itch for a true-crime story set in a small, coastal town. But there are also oddball elements woven in, like a scene in which a longtime criminal smuggler cheers up Forte’s dejected character by dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” on a bridge.
“I didn’t realize how funny it was going to be,” Forte says of the show. “It’s got twists and turns, always keeps you guessing. It’s the kind of thing I usually like to watch.”
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