Fifteen seconds of fame, MacGruber?

Will Forte reflected on one of the shakiest chapters of his career during an interview with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. The comedian said that he and Saturday Night Live writers Jorma Taccone and John Solomon had filmed the MacGruber movie (based on their MacGyver parody sketches from SNL) in 2009 and that the movie hit theaters a week after SNL‘s season finale.

“The movie came out and just s— the bed, just did tremendously badly,” Forte said. “And it was tough for a couple weeks, and then me and John and Jorma, my other buddies who we all made the movie together, we all just got together and said, ‘You know what? We’re proud of this thing. Eff it.'”

Forte said he came to understand that it was time to depart from Studio 8H. “Over the next couple weeks, I just realized,” he explained. “With the help of my agents and manager, they said, ‘Look, you can go back to SNL, but you’re not gonna get to make another SNL movie. That’s just not gonna happen. So at some point, you’re gonna have to leave. We think this is probably a good time to leave!’ And I’m like, ‘Right after laying a major egg in the movies?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s always gonna be, you’re just gonna have to do it at some point.'”

The comedian said that his sister having her first child helped him decide to leave much easier and Lorne Michaels understood. “I wanted to be closer to my sister, who’d just had her first kid, so I decided to leave SNL,” he recalled. “Lorne was awesome about it, and he’s fantastic.”

Forte explained that his initial post-SNL plan was to “see if you can get small supporting parts in comedies and see if you can kinda make your way back up to a point where you could maybe get a kind of a bigger role in a comedy movie,” but he still had a dry period with no work whatsoever. “I just didn’t do anything for about a year and a half,” he recalled.

Forte’s first post-MacGruber gig came in a 2012 comedy movie starring one of SNL‘s most successful alums — as well as one of Forte’s costars from his time on the show. “Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg reached out about being in That’s My Boy,” he remembered. “That was a thrill, ’cause there was part of me that was like, ‘I may never work again!’ Which was fine, ’cause I love writing, and so I was thinking I could go back and write if I need to. But there was part of me that wanted to act, for sure.”

The comedian said that he deeply appreciated the movie and it kicked off a series of other projects he didn’t anticipate. “It was really fun doing it,” Forte said. “That was a big deal when they gave me that job. That meant a lot, and that gave me a little hope. And then right after that, Akiva [Schaffer] was directing the movie which became The Watch, and I got to do a part in that. So that was also a big deal.”

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Around that same period, Forte appeared in several other movies, including Rock of Ages, Grown Ups 2, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Life of Crime. A further big break came with 2013’s Nebraska, the Alexander Payne–directed dramedy that earned six Oscar nominations. “It was like, ‘Okay, I’ll just try to keep doing some small supporting roles,’ and then this Nebraska came up, and it’s like, all of a sudden I got a chance to be in a movie that was kinda more on the dramatic side and be one of the main people in it,” he recalled. “It came outta nowhere.”

Forte reiterated that he never anticipated working on a movie like Nebraska — and that he thought he’d lose the job even after it began. “It was something I thought would never happen, or take 30 years to do, and it was, I still don’t know how it happened, and I thank my lucky stars,” he said. “At the time it was like, ‘This is gonna be taken away from me at some point.’ Like, up until, even after the first week of shooting, I’m like, ‘Are they gonna bring in somebody? Are they gonna fire me and reshoot the first week?’ And then by the time we were like halfway through, I started feeling like they were too financially invested to turn back. But that whole experience was just terrifying.”

Watch the full Where Everybody Knows Your Name interview with Forte above.