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Last week, with New York City enrobed in thick layers of snow, Will Forte sat 49 stories up in a Midtown hotel. On the day of the massive snowfall, the 55-year-old actor said he used the shut-in weather to watch the NFL’s conference championship games and catch up on this year’s slate of Oscar-nominated movies. When I meet him in the spacious suite two days later—the snow no longer falling but the temperatures occasionally dipping into the single digits—it’s not to analyze Emma Stone’s performance in Bugonia or debate the Broncos’ game plan, but to discuss Huntington’s Disease (HD).
Forte, who was a cast member at Saturday Night Live from 2002 to 2010, played the titular role in the SNL-spinoff movie MacGruber, and later starred in the Fox comedy series Last Man on Earth, has personal connections to the rare, neurodegenerative condition. His wife’s father and brother have been affected by HD, which is typically inherited from family members and presents debilitating psychiatric, cognitive, and motor issues. Now directly involved in advocacy work to fight the disease through a partnership with Teva, Forte wants to educate as many people as possible about HD, which currently has no cure.
In addition to spreading the word about HD, the man behind so many iconic comedic characters is living a fairly standard dad life. Walking the dogs, gnawing nicotine gum to stay away from cigarettes, and trying to pass down the family name are all heavy on his mind. Before leaving his hotel room and heading back out into the tundra, Forte also detailed the extensive nudity that was required of his first big Hollywood role.
Will Forte: I was you eight years ago. I met Olivia, my now wife, and her father was suffering from Huntington’s disease at the time. A couple months later, it became clear that they just couldn’t take care of him at home anymore. It was just dangerous. He couldn’t get around, and just needed help that couldn’t be provided at home. They had to have that tough conversation where they were going to move him into a care facility. While he was in the care facility, he was kind of deteriorating. During that time, my wife took the test for the Huntington’s gene, found out she didn’t have it, but then a couple months later, her brother Douglas found out that he did.
Her father passed away a couple years ago, and it was really tough. To know that Douglas knew that he had it—and had to watch as his father was dying from this disease, and in a way kind of seeing what could be his future—was very, very tough for all of us. It feels so helpless because it’s just a horrendous disease, and it seems like there’s not much that you can do. It just kind of slowly grinds you down physically and then mentally, and it’s so tough to see people going through it. We just thought, we’ve got to do something. So, we started helping out and seeking out these different organizations.
My wife joined the board of one called HDSA, that’s Huntington’s Disease Society of America. We started helping with fundraisers with them, and meeting more people in the community. Then Teva heard that story and approached us about this awareness campaign. It’s such a hideous disease, and there are so many people affected by it. It’s pretty nuts that more people don’t know about it. I think I heard that more people have Huntington’s than ALS, but everybody’s heard of ALS and hardly anybody’s heard of Huntington’s. It’s a hereditary brain disease. But basically, the best way to describe it is, it’s like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS all jammed into one thing. It’s a disease that just slowly takes everything away from you. HonestlyHD.com is a really good resource for telling you all about Huntington’s, describing all this stuff in a way better way.
Body, I’m feeling pretty good about stuff. I exercise pretty religiously. I’m doing it a little differently now. For years and years, I was a cardio person. I was like, if I’m not sweating, it’s not counting as exercise. Then over the last probably six or seven years, I’ve put in weight stuff, like weightlifting. Curls and extensions and a lot of leg stuff, just trying to keep the muscles strong.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking. I do 20,000 steps again. That’s the goal. I don’t always do it, but I challenged myself—not last year, but the year before—to do 20,000 steps a day. I got it. I averaged more than 20,000 steps a day! That was both great for physical health and for mental health, because I’m outside more, and I’m not looking at my phone. I might be listening to a book on tape, or I’m catching up with people on the phone. It was just really nice to be outside more and a little more present in life. So mentally I feel like I’m in a good place, and spiritually I’m inquisitive. I’m just kind of open to what’s out there.
I have been a self-diagnosed OCD person for years, and I’m finally going to get an assessment to find out what it is. My wife was thinking—I’ve always said I wasn’t—but she was like, “Why wouldn’t you just get it checked out? It makes all the sense in the world.” It’s like, I do so much physical training. Why wouldn’t I check in on my mental welfare? Maybe I don’t even have OCD. Maybe it’s something else.
I’m pretty sure it’s OCD. I’ll check back with you when I have the assessment. There’s something about the act of moving forward that’s really feeling empowered. I’m excited to learn more about myself. The older I get, the more I realize, “Oh, I don’t know shit.” I’m just excited to learn more about myself, about the world. But generally, I’m feeling pretty happy and positive.
It’s a little of both. I’ll exercise once a day, but that won’t always be something steps-related. Sometimes it’s a rowing machine. But I have dogs, so I’ll take them out, and I have two young kids, so I’m chasing them around. If everyone was wearing a Fitbit, there’d be a lot of people who would be surprised at how many steps they get in a day without knowing.
Sure I did! I was born in Oakland, California in 1970. The ’70s were a really good time for the Oakland Raiders, and my next door neighbors worked for the Raiders, so I was a Raider through and through. That’s what I thought I would do, but being five nine and a half takes you out of a lot of the positions there.
I don’t know what I would be. I mean, when I played football in high school, my senior year, I was a nose guard. Actually, I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I was pretty good. I think in high school, you just have a lot of big guys. At least in our school district, it was just a lot of big guys who didn’t really know what they were doing. Not that I knew what I was doing. But because I was shorter, I could kind of get up, leverage, it’s all physics.
I didn’t put that on there! I don’t know who put that on there. But I would say that probably fits. I feel like I treated people in high school the way I would want to be treated, and yeah, I would say I had a lot of friends. Being friendly and curious and not caring who was part of which clique, that wasn’t going to make me not talk to somebody if they weren’t a cool person, or something like that. I feel like in a lot of ways, the older I’ve gotten—sometimes I feel like I went away from that for a while, because when you go into the entertainment industry, you suddenly get just a lot of people trying to get at you. You’ve got to put a little barrier up.
It’s just a weird thing. I like talking to a lot of people, but then it would get to a point where I was spending so much time talking to these other people that I’d be neglecting my best friends or my girlfriends or whatever. You just got to find the healthy balance, and that took a while, because it’s very weird being in the public eye. Dealing with that situation where you’re going around and people know who you are—and the very tiny version of that—I’m not saying like, “Oh, I’m a big deal.”
I’m very low-level with that stuff. Even at the low level that I’m at, it’s weird. I can’t imagine somebody like Jennifer Aniston. I got to do a movie with her, and to see all the paparazzi constantly following her around, and how she’s able to gracefully manage it, is just amazing.
Look, I’ll tell you, most interactions I’ll have with people—in fact, I’d say almost all of them—are very pleasant. It’s people, “Oh, I don’t want to bug you, but just wanted to say I was a fan of Last Man on Earth.” It always feels good. It’s so nice to meet people, because it’s been 10 years since Last Man on Earth, or eight years, or whatever. You go, “Oh, that was such a special part of my life.” To know that it’ll still be in their heads a little bit is a good feeling.
Probably nine days out of 10, I’m going to get some yogurt and put some flax and chia in there, almonds, granola, and fiber cereal. Might throw a little bit of oat milk or some kind of milk in there and mix it around. It’s called Daddy’s Special Yogurt, and the kids love it too. That’s my go-to for breakfast.
I don’t do the fruit, and I should. It’s great. Blueberries in there would be the perfect addition. You’re right. Thank you for reminding me. Lunch, that’s the real…
What would a typical lunch be? If I’m just hanging at home, I’ll probably make a big bed of arugula. I love arugula. Favorite of the greens. Then I’ll probably throw some walnuts in there, and tuna or turkey. Olivia has got me on nutritional yeast, which is a good little element. Also getting some avocados, for sure.
Based on these two things, I should be the healthiest person, should not have any body fat on me. But then some days it’s like, some kind of quick sandwich, not that healthy. Starting out the day, I try to at least get two good healthy meals in, and then for dinner it’s usually whatever the kids are eating.
But then it all goes off the rails, because if there’s Jeni’s ice cream, that’s my favorite ice cream of all time. My wife always will keep us stocked up, and I can’t have less than a pint of it. I will eat the whole pint, or whatever’s left of a pint. It’s dangerous. I’ve had to make her stop getting it for me. As much willpower as I have in certain areas of my life, ice cream, I’m just powerless.
We had gotten home from, I think it was the premiere of The Four Seasons, and we got home and there was a full [Jeni’s] Gooey Butter Cake, but then there was a different kind of ice cream. I think it was maybe Ben & Jerry’s dirt cake, dirt pie, whatever. It’s just got a bunch of shaved chocolate things. That was kind of a three-quarters pint situation. I got to the end of that. I took down the three-quarters pint one, and then I was like, God, I just got to have one bite of the Gooey Butter Cake. Just one bite, right? What could go wrong here? Ate that whole pint. So it was a pint and three quarters. Then I was still hungry so I ate these Cheez-It puffs.
We had done a little drinking at the premiere, but that was probably my biggest ice cream day of all time. No regrets. Thank you.
Oh, really?
If I freeze some blueberries, somehow it gives me the sensation that it’s kind of an ice cream. That’s a good trick.
That was an incredibly stressful situation. I was smoking for the first couple years of that, so that was really tough. On the real stressful days—the writing days, the Tuesdays where you did the bulk of the writing, and then on the Saturdays of the show—I would smoke quite a bit. The other days, wouldn’t smoke a lot. Then I started tapering off on the smoking, and I got on nicotine gum. About 18 years later, I’m still chewing nicotine gum. That’s not great, but it’s better than smoking.
But yeah, it was a stress machine. You learn to deal with it, and you figure out your systems that work for you. That system is different for everybody there. Everybody does it differently. Me, it was better to exhaust myself physically, better for my mental state of mind to suffer the exhaustion than to get more sleep and turn something in that I didn’t think was ready yet. I probably was among the people who stayed a little longer than most, or maybe the most.
Toward the end, I did sleep on the couch, because I was just like, it’s going to be 20 minutes to go back home, 20 minutes to get back. At that point, every minute is counting. Every minute is a minute of sleep. Couch was good enough. I don’t know that I could go back and do that again. It is so grueling, that schedule. But man, is it fun while you’re doing it. It’s exhausting and it’s stressful, but also, there’s just nothing like it.
I got to get better about hydration. I’m getting better and better, but I used to not drink any water. People always say, “If you’re tired, you’re probably just dehydrated. So don’t drink that coffee.” Then whenever I go like, “Yeah, but instead of getting this fifth coffee of the day, drink a water,” I feel like a million bucks. Why don’t I do this all the time?
I’m trying to think…no!
I’ve been very lucky. In fact, I go to the doctor when I’m supposed to, and I do the yearly physical, so I stay on top of it. I did one of those Prenuvo scans, just because why not? And then I went in and I asked my doctor, “Can I do some kind of heart scan?” I’ve fluctuated in weight over the years, had cholesterol issues, you know we’ve talked about how much I love ice cream. I exercise a lot, so I think the blood’s pumping all that fat through my system pretty well, but what if I’m just one of those people who is just about to close up their arteries and I’m just going to keel over from heart disease?
Yeah, just, “Is that a weird thing to do?” He said, “Why not? You’ll have to pay out of your own pocket, because you don't have a reason for it.” I was like, “It’s worth it just for the peace of mind.” I found out that I’m all good there. That’s a good feeling. I’m insanely lucky.
I have a buddy who went through a cancer scare, and thank God, is through it. But it just happens so fast. I soared through my physical last year, but who’s to say I’ll soar through the next one? Enjoy the days when you do have your health, because you just take it for granted.
There was way more talking about finding ways to show full-frontal nudity with a comically shortened penis. When we were making the poster for the movie, afterwards, we had this fun idea to do a photo shoot for Playgirl of these old nudes that MacGruber did way back in the day when he was a young buck. But then we found out that Playgirl wasn’t really putting out a magazine anymore. So we said, “Okay, let’s just do it and we’ll leak them out.”
We take these pictures of me. I had something covering my own private parts, but then we had asked somebody to Photoshop a very small penis onto these pictures. This person sent us back the first round, and we looked at them and we’re like, “Oh, we said a very small penis.” She said, “That is a very small penis.” It was not too far off from what my existing penis is. Oh, brother.
No physical training for that stuff. I mean, at the time, that was when I was running a lot. But it’s so funny. I wear this sleeveless monk’s robe, or something, at the very beginning of the movie, and there’s not any musculature in my arms.
First of all, definite fan of his work. And yeah, it’s a small, select club. Me and Orville, but there’s Orville Wright from the Wright Brothers, Orville Peck. Those are, to my knowledge, the only Orvilles I know. I feel a little bit of guilt that I don’t use that name as my name.
But now I feel like if I ever had a son—I have two daughters, and I don’t think we’re going to have a third—but if we ever did and it was a boy, I would definitely name the son Orville.
Orville Willis Forte V. But I’m the only one who’s used any part of our name. None of them used Orville. My great grandpa was Buster. Grandpa was Junie. Dad was Rebel. Then I’m Will. For a long time I was like, yeah, but what would I name the kid? Name him Orville, just call him Orv. Pretty cool name.
In Real-Life Diet, athletes, celebrities, and other high performers talk about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.