For comedy aficionados, Will Forte has been a household name for years.
After working as a writer on The Late Show with David Letterman in the late ’90s and getting his first big break as a fan favourite on Saturday Night Live in the early 2000s, the US comedian went on to star in several popular TV shows and films: the Emmy-nominated The Last Man on Earth (which he also created), 30 Rock, Beerfest, How I Met Your Mother, and even local favourite, HBO show Flight of the Conchords.
But in recent years, casual fans are finally turning on to Forte’s work. This past February, he played Amy Schumer’s love interest in Kinda Pregnant; in May, he featured in the all-star cast of Netflix’s The Four Seasons; and now, the California-born actor is leading a new Stan Original series, Sunny Nights, alongside fellow US heavyweight, D’Arcy Carden, and a stacked Australian cast that includes Rachel House (Thor: Ragnarok, Heartbreak High), Jessica De Gouw (The Couple Next Door, The Artful Dodger), and even former NRL star, Willie Mason.
Though the local streamer prides itself on local content, bringing in Forte and Carden for the dark comedy series should prove a masterstroke. Sunny Nights is directed by Australian filmmaker Trent O’Donnell, who created the hugely popular No Activity with Stan in the mid-2010s. This series was so popular that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez, teamed with O’Donnell and co-creator Patrick Brammall to produce a US version. That iteration starred some of Hollywood’s finest like Bob Odenkirk, Cristin Milioti, Jesse Plemons, J.K. Simmons, and Forte, who struck up a friendship with O’Donnell while filming season four.
‘Sunny Nights’
“We had each other’s phone numbers, and it was very pleasant working with him on No Activity, but, like, it was all online,” Forte tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ over Zoom from New York.
“It was during COVID, so it was the online version, where what we did was, basically, we’re doing voice recording with a face capture app, so they can animate with it. [O’Donnell] was so pleasant, and I really enjoyed working with him.”
Forte admits that between No Activity and Sunny Nights, there was no conversation about working together. But when that time came, it was an easy decision.
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“We kept in touch enough so that he would reach out from time to time and just say hello, and we’d exchange texts, and then he just reached out out of the blue with [Sunny Nights]. Even though it was only, like, a germ of an idea, and I think they had one script at that point, it was like, ‘Oh, I gotta take this seriously. This is something I should seriously consider because this guy is just awesome.’ I’m like, ‘Well, this is pretty great, but I mean, I can’t decide on an eight-episode thing on one script.’
“So then a couple months later, another script comes, and it’s just as good and funny and ends on this cliffhanger where you’re like, ‘Oh, where’s this going to go?’ It was really after only two episodes were written that I had to make this decision: Am I bringing my whole family down to Australia on the chance that these other six episodes are going to be as good? With Trent O’Donnell, you say yes to that.
“Looking back, it is the greatest decision of my life. Marrying my wife, deciding to have kids, those are all other ones up there as well, obviously, but everything about this show turned out to be the best version.”
In Sunny Nights, Forte stars as straight-laced Martin, who teams up with his sister, Vicki (Carden), who set up a spray tan business in Sydney called Tansform, where his estranged wife lives. But as Martin and Vicki attempt to turn their company from a start-up operating out of the back of a van into a multi-million-dollar empire, the siblings become tangled up in Sydney’s criminal underworld, and when a ruthless gangster begins to catch up with them, the two must figure out how to stay alive, out of prison, and in the black.
Forte and Carden in ‘Sunny Nights’
Filming commenced in Sydney in mid-2024, where Forte set up a temporary home for his family to stay for three months. Temporary, at least, for now.
“We fell in love with it,” Forte smiles. “I got to meet this person who will be family for the rest of my life in D’Arcy Carden. Her and her husband, Jason, lived down there the whole time. We would hang out all the time. It was fantastic. The crew was unbelievably wonderful, just so good at what they did. Each one of them, you could go on vacation with. Man, I loved it. I look back on it, I could talk about Sunny Nights for hours and hours.”
Without giving away spoilers, that cliffhanger Forte mentioned earlier may suggest a second season could follow. Could he relocate to Australia again, possibly permanently this time?
“The tricky thing is my daughter is now old enough that she’s actually going into a school where it’s a little more important that she’s there all the time,” he admits. We got lucky, we were able to put her into a local school… it was in Rose Bay, this delightful school, and she fit in with everybody, and we loved it there. It’s not as simple as ‘Oh, come over for the weekend or a week’ or whatever.
“We would make it happen because there’s no way I would not be a part of this again, and I think we’d probably try to bring the whole family down just because I couldn’t be away from them for that long. Australia brought out the best in all of us.
“Darcy and I talk about it all the time, just like, ‘We could live there. Why don’t we move to Sydney?’ We’re both from Northern California, so right outside San Francisco. The whole harbour area reminds us of San Francisco. It’s just the best of everything all wrapped into one, so it’s all felt very familiar, but was totally new at the same time. I loved it. I just can’t say enough about it.”
While Forte was making a name for himself as one of the quirkiest and outright funniest cast members on Saturday Night Live between 2002-2010, Australian and New Zealand fans may have only seen the 55-year-old comic’s work for the first time in an episode of Flight of the Conchords in 2007. In that one-off appearance, Forte stole the episode as Ben, an actor hired by Bret and Jemaine pretending to be a record label executive, to convince Murray that he is a competent band manager.
It’s strange to think nearly 20 years on, Forte could be reintroducing himself to local audiences as the lead in an Australian production. Forte looks back on his Flight of the Conchords appearance with great fondness, especially for what followed after that.
“I shot that in five days or something like that, maybe even less,” he recalls. “So many things came from that that have changed my life, like my relationship with [Conchords cast member] Kristen Schaal, who then went on to be my wife in The Last Man on Earth, all from that week of shooting Flight of the Conchords. What a great show. I love that show.”
Forte has made a habit of stealing the scene in just about anything he appears in, cameo or otherwise: Ben in Flight of the Conchords, Randy in How I Met Your Mother, the countless SNL characters like MacGruber (which scored its own feature film in 2010), Jeff Montgomery and Tim Calhoun, to name a few. The list goes on.
But some of his recent roles, including Sunny Nights, have allowed Forte to show off his dramatic chops, a side many have never seen. However, as Forte shares, he had intended to pursue drama earlier in his career, but the success of his comedy work prevented it.
“I probably would have done it earlier, but I don’t think anybody would ever think of me in that way. I just got really lucky. ” he says. “When I was coming out of SNL, I was never like, ‘I want to stretch my acting chops.’ I love doing stupid, absurd comedy, you know? Anything anybody would let me do was great. And then, I got this opportunity to do this movie called Run & Jump in Ireland, which was straight drama, and then the movie Nebraska, which was a comedy drama. So I think people saw that [and thought] ‘Oh, he didn’t botch it too bad with these dramas. Maybe we’ll give more opportunities to do stuff with a little more of that in it.’
“I think I would have been excited to do something like that all along, but the opportunities just weren’t there.”
Though he’s proven himself to be an all-rounder, it’s fair to say the reason Forte wasn’t getting the dramatic opportunities was that his style of comedy was just too unique, and frankly, too good. SNL fans constantly cite him as one of the most underrated cast members, while many fellow stars of the iconic sketch show have praised his work throughout his eight-season run.
As expected, Forte is humbled by the praise.
“It’s interesting. I was a writer before going to SNL. SNL was my dream” Forte begins. Then I got to do SNL for 8 years. I didn’t have much of a plan after that. So already it was like, ‘My dream was fulfilled.’ When I came out of SNL, it was right after MacGruber was bombing. I just thought I’m not gonna ever get a chance to do anything else, really. I’ll probably just go back to writing. So the fact that I have been able to do these different things, somebody’s up there looking out for me ’cause I just thought I was going to go back to writing and yet just somehow I have been able to keep working.
L-R: Jason Sudeikis, Andy Samberg, Kenan Thompson and Forte, 2006. Image: Carley Margolis/FilmMagic
“It’s all gravy. I was so happy just getting to be on SNL and getting to write at Letterman. Those were my two dreams, and now it’s just like, the fact that I’m an old man now, and still getting all these opportunities. I’m just lucky.”
As well as the release of Sunny Nights (and the hopes of a second season), Forte is currently filming the second season of The Four Seasons led by fellow SNL alum Tina Fey, who plays his wife in the series.
He says these types of projects continue to inspire him both as an actor and writer. And if there is ever a concern about his time in the spotlight coming to an end, the answer is simple: show up and do the work.
“Tina is one of my idols. I’ve had 15 years out of SNL, and then you get this job, and you go right back… Tina has basically always been my boss at SNL when I came in; she was the head writer. And then, 30 Rock, she was my boss. So, you come back, there’s no point where you’re like, ‘Hey, I’ve been working for 15 years at SNL.’ You’re like, ‘I gotta make sure Tina likes what I do!’ Know your lines, be on time, that never goes away. What an honour to have Tina choose you to play her husband! I want to honour her by showing her every day that she made the right choice and just giving it my all. I think that that’s one of the really fun things about working on The Four Seasons. Coleman Domingo is on this show and Steve Carell last year, just these amazing people, and they are all working their asses off. Nobody ever comes to set not knowing their lines. It’s just been great.
“And that’s what it was like doing Sunny Nights. Getting to work with Darcy and know her – that just turned into the experience of a lifetime.”
Sunny Nights is streaming on Stan now.
