Yahoo Finance Will Forte on Bringing Back MacGruber for a Third Time: 'It Was Too Fun of An Experience'
Peacock
Will Forte is stepping back into a familiar role.
The Saturday Night Live alum, 51, is reprising his MacGruber character (which was based on the MacGyver parody character from SNL) in a new comedy series, which premieres Dec. 16 on Peacock.
"One of the things that I love about playing MacGruber, is it's just such a different person than I am in my real life," Forte tells PEOPLE in this week's issue. "He just says whatever he feels in the moment, he doesn't care about what anybody thinks. And I'm the exact opposite. I overthink everything, I'm probably a little too cautious."
Following his eight-year run on SNL where Forte appeared as MacGruber in multiple popular sketches, it was later adapted into the 2010 film of the same name which starred Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe.
Now, Forte couldn't be happier about bringing it back with Wiig and Phillipe also onboard to reprise their roles.
Peacock
"When we made the movie, it was so long ago," he says. "We had so much fun doing it. Everybody had a good time on set and it was just a magical experience. So when the movie was then about to come out, I think we got very excited about people seeing it. And then of course it didn't do well in the theaters. It's hard to reconcile that in your brain with your hopes for it and it just knocks the wind out of your sail for a little bit," says Forte.
"You think, 'What could we have done differently?' But after a couple of weeks, the three of us talked and just said, 'You know what? This is not on us," he explains. "We made the movie we wanted to make. We're proud of it."
Forte says the latest installment of MacGruber has been in the works for some time.
"We started the charting the course for some other incarnation," he says. "We thought, 'It doesn't even matter if we have to just make it on our iPhones. We've got to do this again.' It was just too fun an experience. And the people that we got to work with were so wonderful and funny and just nice people."
MacGruber premieres Dec. 16 on Peacock.
For more from Will Forte, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
