One of the beloved characters to ever come out of a Saturday Night time Stay sketch is MacGruber, performed by Will Forte, who went on to look in his personal film, streaming TV present and a number of other rejected Tremendous Bowl commercials for a soda firm we gained’t title, however let’s simply say it rhymes with “Schmepsi.”
However as exhausting as it could be to imagine, the MacGyver parody wasn’t written for Forte. In reality, it was first conceived of by SNL author and Lonely Islander Jorma Taccone for one among SNL’s high-profile superstar company: the less-than-hilarious Lance Armstrong. Looking back, lacking out on the possibility to play MacGruber most likely doesn’t even crack the highest 50,000 Lance Amrstrong profession missteps.
In line with Taccone, he initially pitched a sketch wherein “Lance Armstrong would play MacGyver’s stepbrother MacGruber.” In contrast to his well-known relative, MacGruber would defuse bombs, not with paper clips and chewing gum, however “items of shit and public hair, so any time he asks one among his assistants for one thing he wants, nobody needs to the touch something.”
Sadly, Taccone was “horrible at pitching” and the concept “went over actually badly,” receiving solely groans from the opposite writers. And his follow-up pitch a few business for “chunky mayonnaise” additionally bombed.
With out MacGruber, Armstrong was pressured to star in sketches predicated on the laughable premise that he wasn’t completely superior at each sport. Looking back, it’s aged about in addition to chunky mayonnaise.
Regardless of the rejection, Taccone caught with the MacGruber concept, finally enlisting Forte to be his MacGruber. However Forte wasn’t satisfied. “I wasn’t actually into it as a result of it simply didn’t make sense to me as a sketch,” Forte later confessed, stating that MacGyver had been off the air for a very long time by that time.
However Taccone was so “persistent” that Forte and others agreed to attempt it out simply “to get him to close up.” The primary MacGruber sketch aired in January 2007, a bit greater than a yr after Armstrong hosted. And it’s not so completely different from the preliminary pitch, in that MacGruber asks for pubic hair to disarm the bomb. However as an alternative of being grossed out, his helper (Jeremy Piven) is baffled by the logistics of the request (“the place am I supposed to search out pubic hair in a dam management room?”) and hesitant handy over his personal pubes.
And whereas MacGruber wasn’t MacGyver’s stepbrother, like Armstrong would have been, he was revealed to be his long-lost son.
Taccone and others finally realized that the important thing to writing MacGruber was to lean into his character flaws, as a result of “something that you simply regarded as an issue in somebody’s life, he had. So he’s an alcoholic or a drug addict or he’s unhealthy with cash or he’s a womanizer or he’s extremely useless.”
MacGruber by no means bought blown up whereas attempting to inject himself with human progress hormone earlier than a race, although.
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