MacGruber’s recent return to NBC’s Saturday Night Live never would have happened without the episode’s host, Glen Powell.
Seth Meyers and Lonely Islander Jorma Taccone revealed on their Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast that it was Powell’s idea to bring back the popular Will Forte character when he hosted the November 15 episode.
Powell and Chloe Fineman played MacGruber’s partners in the trio of shorts that aired throughout the episode, in which it was revealed that MacGruber’s name appears in the notorious Epstein files.
“This was Total Request Live, courtesy of Glen Powell,” Meyers revealed on the podcast.
The idea sprouted when Powell — a fan of the “MacGruber” sketches and a bit of an action-film star himself — mentioned the hypothetical idea to writer-producer Peter Huyck, a mutual friend of Forte and Taccone’s.
Despite the Epstein saga dominating the news cycle at the time, the real-life news story actually was not part of the earliest vision for MacGruber’s latest encore.
“It was a totally different idea,” Taccone said. “Then, thanks to Mr. Will Forte, who always has his finger right on the pulse of what he thinks MacGruber should be involved in, it was that MacGruber was in the Epstein files.”
The episode’s three “MacGruber” sketches represented the character’s first new set of explosive adventures since January 2022, and only the second since Forte exited the cast in 2010.
In addition to Forte, SNL recruited the regular “MacGruber” creative team to pen the new sketches. Taccone and fellow former writer John Solomon, who also wrote the character’s film and TV adaptations, remotely collaborated on the new installments; Forte was already on the East Coast shooting Season 2 of Tina Fey’s Netflix series The Four Seasons, though that commitment handed the SNL team an even tighter schedule to produce the shorts.
“It was all very last-minute,” Taccone said. “So when we were writing, it would be, like, at lunch for the show he’s doing with Tina.”
Forte’s busy schedule came with one major benefit, however: Fey’s own involvement. The former SNL head writer stepped in for a read-through as the trio fine-tuned the script.
“We basically did a table read with Tina,” said Taccone. “She pitched some good jokes.”
Meyers recounted Lorne Michaels informing him of Powell’s love for “MacGruber” when the pair met for dinner earlier that week. Noting that “Lorne loves ‘MacGruber’ very much… this is no exaggeration,” Meyers said that behind Michaels’ typical mask of seeming put off by the idea of reviving the character, “low-key, Lorne also thought it was rad.”
In fact, after the airing, Taccone pitched the SNL creator on extending the MacGruber universe even further.
“Can we parlay MacGruber being in the news to doing a musical for [Universal]?” Taccone texted Michaels.
“Maybe,” Michaels reportedly replied.
“Universal hates making money, right?” Taccone quipped in a follow-up text.
That prompted a perfectly on-brand dry response from Michaels: “Totally opposed.”
While the 2010 MacGruber movie has become a cult classic, it initially failed to earn back its $10 million budget upon release. A sequel series on Peacock ran for eight episodes. For his part, Meyers defended the idea of another MacGruber project. “It would be a good time for MacGruber to come out now because, like, no movies make money.”
