Will Forte Talks ‘Coyote vs Acme,’ Raiders, SNL & More with Rich

Will Forte plays a lawyer named Kevin Avery who represents Wile E. Coyote in a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation, and honestly, the client has a case.

"He has been having all these products that he's using to try to catch the Road Runner," Forte explained. "They're malfunctioning on him, blowing him up, singeing all his hair off. So he's finally had enough."

Rich noted the geography does some work here. Coyote vs. Acme is set in Albuquerque, a city Bugs Bunny famously kept missing on account of what Forte diagnosed as bad signage. It is also, as Rich pointed out, where a certain other television lawyer practiced.

Forte had absolutely connected those dots. Better Call Saul is one of his favorite shows.

The film sits at 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and Forte knows which comparison it invites. Roger Rabbit is the top of the heap for mixing live action and animation, and those are big shoes. What he keeps returning to is that this was made with love and respect for the Looney Tunes characters they grew up on.

On John Cena, Forte was borderline reverent, and the compliment was specific enough to be interesting. Cena gets long chunks of dialogue and never blows a take, because he is that prepared, and he is a gifted improviser who can slip something funny into the written material and land right back in the script.

"I don't have that talent," Forte said. He can think of the funny line. Then he blows the return trip.

Some of the filmmaking is as low-tech as it sounds. The rocket skates are a pair of blades you hold. Dropping an animated piano onto a real car meant imploding an actual car across many takes, which Forte loved because you could see it working on the day.

Acting opposite a character who is not there is the harder part, and normally that means a tennis ball on a stick for eyelines. Director Dave Green brought in puppeteer Dave Barclay, whose credits include Jabba the Hutt, Yoda and Fraggle Rock, with a Wile E. Coyote puppet. In rehearsals Forte worked against the puppet, so by the time the tennis ball showed up he already knew what Wile E. would do.

Rich then confirmed Forte is still a Raiders fan, though not without grievance.

"I was a little upset by them moving to Las Vegas," Forte said. He was born in Oakland, his A's did the same thing to him, and it stung the way Los Angeles stung in the '80s. It felt so right when they came home. They are still his team.

He has spent real time in the Black Hole, including a day with Phil Villapiano and Franco Harris together, on an anniversary of the Immaculate Reception. Harris died within the next year or so. What stayed with Forte was watching a crowd dressed head to toe in Raiders gear treat Harris with total respect.

Then came Celebrity True or False, which produced the best material of the hour.

True: Forte roomed with Val Kilmer, and the two of them seriously considered running The Amazing Race together.

Kilmer, his MacGruber co-star, needed a place while hunting for a new one in Malibu. What Forte understood to be a couple of days became two and a half or three months. Kilmer walked in on him watching The Amazing Race and told him reality garbage would rot his mind. Forte told him to sit down. By the end of that first episode Kilmer was in, and a few Sundays later they looked at each other and decided they had to do it.

Their representatives said absolutely not.

After Kilmer died, Forte called those same people and reminded them. Their response, he said, was that he should have done it.

"You were the people who told us not to."

His favorite memory of the arrangement is smaller. The two of them at the kitchen table, a Doors song coming on, both of them singing along. Forte thought back to the Doors movie coming out and how he never in a million years expected to shake Val Kilmer's hand, and now here was Kilmer, a roommate he was ready to have move out.

True: he owns the Mazda Miata from MacGruber, sort of. Production was going to sell it for a thousand dollars, so Forte bought it and split ownership three ways with John and Jorma, who put in none of the money. It sat in his garage for over a decade with a dead battery and flat tires until the MacGruber series needed it. He has since auctioned it for charity three times, twice to the same man at 55 grand, who gave it back each time. Smog testing it meant driving a car covered in drawings from the show through Los Angeles traffic.

True: Bruce Dern's friend Jack Nicholson threw a screening party for Nebraska, with Mickey Rooney and Peter Fonda there. Forte talked Nicholson into a photo by pointing out that he was one of the leads in the movie Nicholson was hosting a screening for. Also true, in spirit: the car scenes with Dern ran long enough that bottles became relevant, though Forte declined details on the grounds that what happens in Nebraska stays there.

What he wanted on the record about Dern was the whiplash. Soft-spoken on camera, exactly like the character. The instant they called cut, the most talkative man alive, with stories about Marilyn Monroe, occasionally pausing to phone in a bet using numbers Forte could not decode.

False, and he wanted to correct it: it is not six people he owes yogurt to for life. It is two. A MacGruber charity auction had escalating perks, and somebody hit a tier Forte never believed anyone would reach, which he had defined as yogurt twice a year forever. He is behind, and would like Eric to know he is thinking about him.

The last question was about the SNL sketch where he dances in a locker room with Peyton Manning, which was a collaboration with John Lutz. Lutz brought the song. Forte brought a premise about a coach motivating his team with something stupid. The dancing was added at the last second before the table read, almost as an afterthought.

It is his favorite sketch he was ever part of, and Manning needed no convincing.

Nothing was choreographed, which is why the cast is visibly struggling behind him, Bill Hader covering his face rather than risk looking. Usually the best version happens at dress rehearsal, where nobody sees it, and then you blow it on air. This time it came out when it counted.

Forte's only physical note: Manning is so tall that when he lifted Forte's leg to play it like a guitar, it nearly tore him in half. He was just turning 40, and he does not stretch much.