Will Forte

Orville Willis Forte IV was born in Alameda, California in 1970 and spent eight seasons on Saturday Night Live, from 2002 to 2010, as both writer and cast member. The character that outlived the tenure was MacGruber, a parody of an eighties action hero built on a single joke, which is that the bomb always goes off. He has since played that man in a feature film in 2010 and a limited series in 2021, which is an extraordinary amount of mileage from one gag.

That is the Forte quality in miniature: he commits to a bit long past the point where a reasonable performer would let go, and the discomfort is the payload. It is why his best characters are men with no self-awareness and enormous confidence, and why he is so good at playing the last three seconds of a joke, when everyone else has stopped laughing and he has not.

The two things that prove he is more than that arrived close together. He created and starred in The Last Man on Earth, a network sitcom that spends four seasons methodically establishing that its hero is selfish, petty and a liar, and asks you to keep watching him anyway. And in Nebraska he plays David Grant, the son driving his stubborn, drink-worn father from Montana to Nebraska to collect a prize that does not exist, entirely straight, with all the mugging switched off. It is a real performance, and it reframes everything else.