Will Forte reveals SNL still makes him nervous after 16-year break, and finds a new chapter in Sunny Nights
In a dim service corridor that funnels performers toward a live stage, will forte pauses and feels it again — a tightening in the chest, a cellular jolt that arrives the moment he crosses the threshold. The sensation, he says, has returned every time he walks through those studio doors even after a long absence.
Will Forte: Why does SNL still trigger that panic?
Forte has described the feeling as an almost physical panic response, one that is “built into every cell of your body. ” He has used the phrase “cellular memory” to explain how the high-pressure, live environment can leave an imprint that persists long after a performer leaves a run of shows. That imprint, he reflects, is a mix of honor and grind: an “amazing place with this tradition” that also demanded weekly creative and emotional labor.
He was both a cast member and a writer on the program during a period of his career that stretched from 2002 to 2010, a time when he created recurring characters such as MacGruber. After that tenure he has returned intermittently for guest appearances and special sketches; each return, he says, still activates that same bodily response.
The actor also spoke of the rare opportunity to step back during a recent anniversary celebration, which allowed him to feel the magnitude of that chapter. He described moments of being starstruck as he encountered performers he had long admired but never formally met. Even after years on television, he confessed to remaining shy in those encounters, sometimes lacking the courage to make an introduction to comedy heroes.
What is Sunny Nights and how does Will Forte fit into it?
Outside the live stage anxiety, Forte has moved into a new creative rhythm in a darkly comic series that follows two Midwestern siblings who relocate overseas to launch a spray-tan business. In the show he plays Martin Marvin, a man who spent two decades as a risk analyst and is only now taking what the story frames as his first real risk. His sister, Vicki, is a volatile foil who has dabbled in petty crimes and drags them both into escalating criminality.
The series places ordinary people in increasingly furious circumstances: cold opens and early set pieces include brutal, often funny shocks such as a staged tooth extraction and other violent comic set pieces. The creative team — creators Nick Keetch and Ty Freer — center the plot on the siblings’ attempt to build a spray-tan product, pitched within the story as a transformative beauty item made from a native berry, and on how that business intersects with the darker pressures of money, pride, and survival.
Critics and reviewers have noted the show’s loud, physical approach to comedy and its willingness to blend violence and farce: exploding crocodiles, crashes, and other extreme incidents punctuate what remains, at heart, a story about midlife reassessment and sibling codependency. The cast around Forte includes a collection of performers who populate the Sydney-set world, among them a wife figure whose decision to return to another country becomes one emotional catalyst for the plot.
Even here, will forte’s comic instincts are deployed against a backdrop of anxiety and risk. Martin’s struggle — to win back a life that’s drifted or to accept the consequences of new choices — echoes the actor’s wider reflections on the cost and thrill of working in high-stakes comedy.
How do these two strands connect, and what comes next?
Two threads run through these moments: the long shadow of a formative, live-comedy workplace and the actor’s continued curiosity for roles that pair humor with danger. Where the studio doorway still triggers a “cellular” reaction, the television series gives Forte a setting to explore a different kind of nervousness on screen — a man confronting risk for the first time in his life while being pulled into situations that escalate beyond his control.
Those who made the series have shaped it to test characters in violent, comic ways; Forte finds himself part of that experiment both as a performer and as someone who knows what it feels like to have a rigorous comedic institution leave a mark. The cycle of returning for guest sketches, stepping into a celebratory milestone of the medium, and taking on a new serialized role suggests a creative arc defined as much by old loyalties as by new risks.
Back in that corridor, the tightening remains unresolved: part badge of honor, part reminder of pressure. The question that follows him out of the studio and into the fiction he now headlines is the same — how do you live with the memory of high-stakes performance and still choose to take the next leap?
