“It might be one of my favorite things to talk about,” Seth Meyers said of the 2010 action-comedy MacGruber. Meyers was an executive producer of the film; he was also head writer at Saturday Night Live in 2007 when writer Jorma Taccone pitched the first sketch about its title character, a cocksure yet inept action hero inspired by Richard Dean Anderson’s crafty MacGyver.

The idea elicited groans. But 10 sketches and a Super Bowl commercial later, MacGruber, embodied by Will Forte, had gained enough pop-culture cachet for SNL creator Lorne Michaels to champion a hard-R-rated action-comedy centered on him.

Released May 21, 2010, the film bombed spectacularly. Over the past decade, though, it’s been rediscovered on cable and streaming—and has undergone a cultural reassessment, inspiring articles with titles such as “We Failed This Film” and “From box-office bomb to cult favorite,” and drawing celebrity admirers such as Craig Mazin, the Emmy-winning creator and screenwriter of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl. “MacGruber is possibly the most confident movie ever made,” Mazin told Vanity Fair via email. “It is completely in love with itself. It doesn’t acknowledge the existence of (much less care about) an audience—it does whatever the hell it wants. That’s usually a recipe for utter disaster. In this case? Sheer brilliance. MacGruber should be in the Library of Congress. I’m dead serious. It’s perfect.”

Ahead, the story of MacGruber, the movie and sketch-comedy legend, as told by Forte, Taccone, Meyers, Michaels, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Val Kilmer, and others—including words of encouragement from MacGruber superfan Christopher Nolan.

Jorma Taccone joined the staff of Saturday Night Live in 2005. He and his comedy partners Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer quickly distinguished themselves as the engines behind the show’s pretaped Digital Short segments. But there was one idea Taccone had trouble selling.

Jorma Taccone (MacGruber cowriter and director): As I recall, it was pitched the first time that MacGruber was MacGyver’s stepbrother. Like MacGyver, he defuses bombs and gets into sticky situations—but in defusing bombs, he only uses disgusting items such as pubic hair and pieces of dog shit. It got a groan from everyone, rightfully so. But the idea stuck with me.

Seth Meyers (executive producer): It struck me as a stupid, one-joke idea. But I will fully admit I was wrong.

Taccone: I would write with Will and John Solomon a lot. I kept pitching it to them. They said no for about a month.

Will Forte (MacGruber): My initial reaction was, that sounds really stupid. The next week [Taccone] came back and said, “How about trying that MacGruber thing?” Just to get him to shut up about it, I said, “Okay, fine.” Then we stumbled upon the structure of three short films instead of one live sketch.

Taccone: With comedy, the stupider the idea, the faster you should tell it. The first [segment] was about a minute and a half, the second one would be about a minute, and the last one would be about 30 seconds.

Forte: At the end of writing the first one, I didn’t think, Oh, my God, we have something amazing here. I just thought, Oh, I’m not embarrassed to hear this at the table read.

Lorne Michaels (SNL creator; MacGruber coproducer): I didn’t have the same connection to MacGyver that they did. I knew the show, but it hadn’t been something I watched every week. But I was, you know, like everything else, we’ll see what we think at the read-through. And it was funny.

The first MacGruber sketch aired on January 20, 2007, in an episode hosted by Jeremy Piven. It set the template for future sketches: an abandoned factory control room, the only means of escape locked, a bomb set to go off in 20 seconds. While Pivin’s JoJo assesses the situation, Maya Rudolph’s Casey counts down the seconds. MacGruber calls for a paper clip, twine, a gum wrapper, and a dog turd that JoJo is loath to pick up.

Jeremy Piven (JoJo): The premise is so fertile to me because you’ve got someone who is completely incompetent, but thinks he’s competent. Usually my background is playing irrational characters like Ari Gold [on Entourage]. To play a character that was the [rational] audience navigating through this madness was a treat.

Taccone: Maya’s character is named Casey because it’s a reference to the R&B group K-Ci and JoJo.

Maya Rudolph (Casey): That didn’t occur to me. That’s one hundred percent Jorma. There’s no way Will knew who K-Ci and JoJo were.

Forte: I thought MacGruber would never be heard of again—but a couple of weeks later, Lorne specifically asked if we would want to do another MacGruber.

Meyers: I do remember Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill being the kind of hosts who would come on the show and say, “I really want to do a MacGruber.”

Gradually, MacGruber was established as a recurring character—popular enough that when Pepsi approached Michaels about making an SNL-based commercial that would air during the 2009 Super Bowl, he went to the mat for MacGruber, much to the soft drink company’s chagrin.

Michaels: They were rebranding Pepsi. It was a big campaign. The can would be different; the logo was different. I said, [MacGruber] is popular; it will be explosive on the Super Bowl. They were not enthusiastic.

Meyers: It was incredible. I was in a meeting with Pepsi talking about it. There’s this really interesting thing Lorne does, which is he doesn’t really take no for an answer— he just runs out the clock until all of a sudden, there’s a MacGruber Pepsi Super Bowl commercial.

Michaels: If you believe in something, you do everything you can to make it happen.

The ad was successful enough to spur talk of bringing MacGruber into a new medium.

Taccone: Lorne was like, “You guys wanna make a movie?” We were like, “Uh, no, there’s no idea there.” He said, “I think you should do it. Just write it.” We really wavered hard, me especially. He said, “You can direct it.” I’m like, “Sure.”

Meyers: The longer MacGruber went on, the bigger a fan Lorne became of it. And then people who were bad with money thought it was a good idea to make a movie. Ultimately, that’s how the most interesting things get made in Hollywood.

Tucker Tooley (president of production, Relativity Media): The Pepsi commercial got a lot of attention. It certainly helped launch a conversation about a movie. The knee-jerk reaction on something like that is simultaneously yes and no—skits are hard to translate into a full-length feature, but there’s also a built-in audience behind it. And that’s ultimately what we set out to do with MacGruber: harness that in the right direction,

Forte: Just like with the Super Bowl commercial, Lorne said, “I’m going to make this happen.” He just willed it into existence.

Kristen Wiig (Vicki St. Elmo): We all wanted to do it. We’re all friends, and being able to work with your friends is the best part of this business. We just had the best time.

So Taccone, Forte, and cowriter John Solomon set about adapting their 90-second sketches into a feature-length film. Their first task: discover who MacGruber truly was.

John Solomon (cowriter): Our first decision was to move it away from the sketches and make it look like a real action movie with real jeopardy, real drama.

Forte: All of us were raised on these intense ’80s action movies: First Blood, Uncommon Valor, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon. That was the world we envisioned.

Taccone: One of the things we kept coming across when we were writing it was [that] our ideas had to be less stupid than some of the films we were referencing. You can’t do a tanker truck filled with cocaine, like in Tango & Cash. Why would you ever have a tanker truck filled with cocaine?

Creating their own throat-ripping action world meant populating it beyond MacGruber, Wiig’s Vicki St. Elmo—who became MacGruber’s SNL foil after Maya Rudolph left the show in 2007—and an unfortunate, soon-to-be-blown-up third party. The call went out for dramatic actors who could convey gravitas while being funny: people like Val Kilmer, who would play villain Dieter von Cunth; Ryan Phillippe, who would play heroic MacGruber comrade Lt. Dixon Piper; and Powers Boothe as MacGruber’s mentor, Col. Jim Faith.

Taccone: Val was at the table read and immediately signed on. He just read it like a calculating badass with a chip on his shoulder. No accent. He told us a week into the shooting that he had read the script cold. He murdered the part, just murdered it.

Val Kilmer (Dieter von Cunth): I am a big fan of Lonely Island and love to visit SNL. And I am in love with Kristen Wiig, and the idea of being able to be mean to her was just priceless since I can hardly speak to her in real life. Isn’t she—Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lisa Kudrow are [all] the best on earth, and the new superstar at SNL, Kate McKinnon. Oh boy can she do it all. Stravinsky–like. Just like Kristen.

Taccone: [Phillippe] actually seems like [he’s the] star of the movie. That’s the joke about Ryan’s character: He’s actually the guy who should be leading the mission. He had just come off Stop-Loss. He was so happy to be doing a comedy.

Ryan Phillippe (Lt. Dixon Piper): I’ve been a huge SNL nerd my whole life. I remember my manager was calling me to talk about offers and as a throwaway, he’s like, “They called to see if you would want to do this read-through for this thing MacGruber.” And I’m like, “Wait, what? They’re making a movie of MacGruber? Yes, I’ll be there. Whatever they want me to do.” I was thrilled.

Forte: I would argue [Phillippe’s] is the most important role. Wiig and I are such weirdos in the movie; we’re obviously living in our own world. For him to ground us in the way that he does is a Herculean task. We got really lucky he wanted to do the movie.

Meyers: The thing about Will is that he’s an incredibly funny performer and this great writer, but he’s also a fantastic actor. You see it in something like Nebraska, but you also see it in MacGruber. I don’t think a lot of performers could pull off what he does in that movie. With each passing day, people like Val and Ryan were really just excited to be working with Will.

The film also found a role for Maya Rudolph: Casey, MacGruber’s lost love.

Rudolph: Kristen was doing the movie, but the boys being the boys, and as sweet as they are, I think they were, “She was an original part of MacGruber. Let’s write a part for Maya.”

MacGruber was filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2009. Its story finds MacGruber lured out of retirement when his nemesis, Dieter von Cunth, steals a bomb for nefarious purposes. The movie’s $10 million budget required a fleet shooting schedule and a creative approach to special effects and explosions.

Brandon Trost (cinematographer): I remember specifically [Michaels] said, “I want to make sure everyone’s perfectly clear that we’re not making an art picture.” And then he looked at me. I remember I walked out of the room with Jorma, saying, “We want this baby to look like Die Hard, right?” And Jorma is like, “Oh, yeah, one hundred percent.”

Taccone: It’s a sleight-of-hand action movie; there’s not that much action in it. There are explosions and gunfire, but there’s very little actual action. Our [visual effects] budget was under $200,000. You can’t do anything for that.

Michaels: Relativity Media was going through its own [financial] issues, but [Tucker Tooley] said if we could make it for that money, we’ll leave you completely alone. And they did.

Trost: We didn’t have the money or time to do it correctly, so we gave [the film] this sense of style. I think the fact that it looked so serious within its own genre just added to the humor.

Forte: Brandon Trost [and Taccone] made it look like a $50 million movie. Looking back on it now, the scenes are so much more MacGrubery than they would have been had we had the money—[like the one] where I rip out this guy’s throat and announce over the loudspeaker that I’m in the control room. They send a bunch of guards, and find this guy taped up so it looks like he’s flipping them off. When they walk in, it triggers this Dixie Cup of water. It’s so dumb, and it just felt so right. That would have never happened if we weren’t forced to scale back.

Meyers: I remember once standing there with Will Forte while Val Kilmer and Powers Boothe were telling stories about working on Tombstone together, and it was really funny that these guys wouldn’t have worked together again if not for MacGruber.

Forte: Jorma did such an amazing job of directing it. I remember Powers approaching him—I think it was the scene where I ask him not to take me off the case and I tell him, “I will suck your dick. I will let you fuck me.” He was wondering what reaction he was supposed to have.

Taccone: He was like, “When he offers to fellate me, how do I take that?” Without missing a beat, I said, “This is real, this is heartbreaking. You’re his mentor. This is seeing him at his lowest point.”

Phillippe: The biggest challenge for me was keeping from breaking. I had to resort to causing myself physical pain, like biting the inside of my cheek to distract myself.

Taccone: We were shooting the scene where Piper’s been shot and MacGruber uses him as a human shield, and he’s super upset about that, obviously, and he gets out of the car. He’s done with the mission, and he kicks MacGruber’s car as hard as he can. There were all these bats. During the filming of that scene, they kept swooping all over [Kristen]. She was shrieking with such glee and fright.

Wiig: There were a lot of diving bats. My wig probably looked like a nest.

Taccone: We were all so punchy. It was four in the morning. Kristen kept pitching me [the idea that] we could go inside MacGruber’s head and see little mice working his brain. She was dying laughing picturing this thing.

MacGruber may be a valentine to the action films and heroes of the 1980s and ’90s, but MacGruber gets something that Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t: a love scene with Vicki St. Elmo.

Trost: [We wanted it] to feel like a sex scene from Top Gun: slow, sensual, candles burning for no reason. We shot it many times. It was so hot. Will was just dripping sweat all over her, and she was trying to deflect that as it was happening. There are moments in that scene where she is literally laughing with her hands over her face. I think it was her birthday.

Solomon: That is one hundred percent Forte. Did he tell you about writing out the amount of grunts in the scene in the script? He was very particular about getting into the script the right amount of grunts. There was a lot of going back and forth: Does it need one more grunt? And, of course, it was Kristen’s birthday.

Phillippe: Have you heard that story that when they shot the Kristen-Will love scene it was her birthday, and he’s just dripping sweat all over her?

Wiig: I didn’t know how we were going to shoot it. Forte is like my brother. I remember the day we shot it, it was my birthday. Forte was so sweaty.

Forte: It was the middle of the summer in Albuquerque, so I was hot already, and the room that we were in was on the top floor of this house. So all the heat has risen to the top floor; you can’t really air-condition the room because it has to be quiet. I’m just hovering over Kristen, and I’m sweating my ass off, and all my hair is shedding on her. She should have gotten hazard pay.

Wiig: I’ve gotten sweat on me before, but I’ve never had someone just dripping it on me, like someone had a watering can over my body. We were laughing so hard.

Taccone: You can actually see it in the take we used. Will is doing his horrible climax, just grunting horribly. In the shot, she holds up her finger and turns her head to the side because she’s laughing so hard. You can see her kind of smile, but it was in shadow so we thought we could get away with it.

Forte: Because she was such a good sport, they put her up in a hotel in Santa Fe for the weekend.

Wiig: Oh my god, I totally forgot about that. Unnecessary. Will kept apologizing for days. It was the scene that my dad didn’t love. He had to walk out.

The two scenes that immediately follow the love scene comprise a comedy hat trick. Guilt-ridden over having sex with Vicki, MacGruber visits the grave of his wife, Casey. Her ghost appears to him. Then things get weird. And gross.

Rudolph: By the time we ended up shooting in New Mexico, I was seven and a half months pregnant. It was hard enough to get me in a wedding dress. I was ready to pop.

Forte: Basically when you’re eight months pregnant, from what I hear, you’re uncomfortable no matter what position you’re in.

Rudolph: They were so concerned about how pregnant I was that they had to hire a stunt double for me so Will could actually look like he was pounding me in the graveyard. They got a very nice young stunt double.

Forte: So weird, too, to be pumping away on a stranger.

Taccone: It was me, John, and Lorne Michaels on set that night, watching the sex scene where Will is humping the air. Will was like, “Can we stop?” And we were like, “No, keep going.” Here’s another fun little fact: The guy who is the maintenance worker watching MacGruber hump the air is Brandon’s dad. The reason he gave such a great performance is that he was actually violently ill.

Trost: He was so sick that day that I think he would have gone home, but he knew he was going to be in the shot, so he wanted to stick around for it. At one point, we heard someone yell-puking. We thought there was a vagrant outside. Turns out it was my dad.

Phillippe: I wasn’t there, but I heard about Lorne taking pictures during the Will-Maya sex scene.

Rudolph: He sure did. I just remember seeing Lorne laughing until he was crying.

Michaels: There was Will, naked, making love to an imaginary Maya. I was standing about 50 feet away, and it was just one of the funniest things I’d ever seem. So I took a picture on my Blackberry, where it remains. It will go to the grave with me, as will my Blackberry. It won’t be used for blackmail ever.

As he’s leaving the cemetery, MacGruber comes across a car with the license plate KFBR392—whose owner once made the mistake of mocking MacGruber’s signature Miata. Earlier in the film, Phillippe’s Piper had found a notebook filled with revenge fantasies centered on the car; now, it’s time for them to come to fruition.

Forte: We didn’t have a payoff. Originally, [KFBR392] just kind of ended after the notepad—which, by the way, is one of the main props that I kept, the notepad and the Miata.

Taccone: We weren’t allowed to bash a car with a baseball bat, we didn’t have enough money. We couldn’t even key the car; we had to do it with a marker, and then wash it off. You felt the lack of money in that moment. And then we did a three-day reshoot [including] one additional scene, which was the burning of the car. Originally, [the car’s owner] was supposed to be [played by] Richard Dean Anderson.

Trost: It was just Will going insane. We beat the shit out of a car and burned it down.

But perhaps MacGruber’s most outrageous set piece is the titular character’s use of a strategically-placed piece of celery to distract a band of armed guards.

Forte: We were all writing in my apartment, and I was working on that scene where Wiig is pulling the bullet out of my leg. Those guys were looking at MacGyver clips, and they saw a thing where he has a number of items assembled. There’s a carrot there. He says something about what he’s going to do, and they say, “How are you going to use the carrot?” And he says, “I’m hungry,” and takes a bite out of the carrot. I don’t know what led them to the idea of distracting the guards with the celery in my butt.

Solomon: That was Jorma and I talking about MacGruber trying to make something out of nothing, using materials at hand, that kind of thing. One of us said something about him finding a carrot laying around and questioning how he would use it. It wasn’t even a real pitch, it was more, this is so stupid that he should just stick it up his butt. Will is going to commit to things you don’t normally see performers willing to do that really are just kind of shocking. He’s pretty fearless that way. And then Will did it.

Trost: We were all hanging out in some hotel room, and [Will] just kind of walked out into the room just to show us what it would look like. Unprompted.

Forte: When we started moving forward with the script, the MacGyver people were not happy we were doing this. Our lawyers said, “just to be safe, change the carrot to something else.” OK, we’ll do celery. By the way, it was not in my butthole. It was in my taint.

Taccone: I’m assuming Will told you the story about the celery. It was the one day that his mom visited the set.

Forte: Oh my god. She had two friends too. [She said], “We are going to Santa Fe in the afternoon, so we’re going to see me in the morning.” And I said, “What would you think about going to Santa Fe in the morning, and then coming to see the scene we shoot in the afternoon?” She said, “No, it works better for us to come by in the morning.” So she got to watch that scene with her own eyes. And I remember after a take, sitting there naked, cupping my balls, standing out there and looking back at my mom. She was fine. She was used to the kind of shit that I do. Her two friends were just aghast.

The script also called for by-the-book Piper to perform a similar stunt to save MacGruber. Phillippe bravely answered the call of duty.

Phillippe: They did not think I was going to go through with it. Behind my back, they were probably like, “He’s going to chicken out.” I never once thought about not doing it. Kristen and Will are two of the most fearless actors I’ve ever worked with—completely unselfconscious. There was no way I was going to chicken out.

Throughout the film, MacGruber menaces Kilmer’s Cunth with a disturbingly specific threat that entails cutting off a certain body part and stuffing it in his mouth. Over-the-top as the movie is, however, that moment never arrives. What happened?

Phillippe: Sometimes it’s hard to tell if those guys actually planned on putting [Val] through that. I heard that he didn’t want the image isolated and separated from the movie.

Wiig: I was probably left out of that conversation.

Taccone: He was absolutely going to get it shoved in his mouth. It was a big argument between us and Val. I pitched it to him mercilessly, like, “Are you sure?” He was laughing the entire time I was pitching it to him. He said, “I just think it would be funnier if I was a lesser actor.” I said, “No, no. Actually, the better actor you are, the funnier it is.”

Forte: I think in the back of all of our heads we thought, Let’s just get to know him. Maybe he’ll change his mind. We wanted to fulfill the promise made throughout the entire movie. We’re three weeks in. We’re having a great time. Everyone is feeling like the movie is going well and we’re doing good stuff. We have become pretty close to him. We thought, We’ll just ask him again, maybe he’ll say that he’ll do it. But he said, “Oh, no, no way.”

Trost: Maybe it is better the way it is, but that was like, the one real compromise we had to live with.

MacGruber would be the first film based on an SNL character since The Ladies Man in 2000. Test screenings were promising, and a screening at South by Southwest with cast and crew in attendance was a sensation.

Forte: We had such a fun time making this movie, and then when we were putting it together in editing, it was just getting better and tighter and funnier. Then we got to go to South by Southwest for the premiere and it played through the roof. It was the best day. I just never experienced something like that.

Phillippe: I’ve been to quite a few festival screenings, and this one was just raucous. They laughed at everything and cheered. I was like, “Oh, my God, we’ve just made this epic comedy,” which was everybody’s dream. I thought for sure even if it didn’t open well, based on this reaction, the word of mouth would surely help it to find an audience. It was the perfect crowd, but it really set us up for a fall.

Taccone: Smart-dumb comedy is the hardest to nail. In a dumb-dumb movie, the audience immediately knows the jokes are stupid, so they can be on board. A smart-smart comedy is anything Judd [Apatow] makes, where people are real and there are real-life problems and emotional heart. A smart-dumb comedy is one where the world is fake. You have to trust [that] the filmmakers are smart and believe in you as an audience, that you’re smart enough to be along with them.

Forte: This is a fucked-up movie made by a bunch of weirdos. I was not expecting the New York Times to give it a good review.

He was right. On May 21, 2010, New York Times critic A.O. Scott excoriated the film in his review, opening it with a plaintive question: “Why does this exist?” Shrek Forever After, released the same weekend, destroyed MacGruber at the box office. MacGruber was pulled from theaters after just three weeks.

Tooley: I was super depressed when it didn’t do well, because I loved the team and the movie. Tracking had indicated we would have a better opening than we did. The numbers were really encouraging in the first half of the day—and then it just literally fell off a cliff. All of a sudden, no one came. What happened was that MacGruber fans came out early, and we were just unable to convert the rest.

Forte: You saw some reviews where it’s clear they didn’t see the movie. There were reviews before the movie came out where they said they hadn’t seen it yet, and stuff like, “Are they just going to have him explode every 30 seconds?” Why didn’t you wait to see what it was before you shit on it?

Meyers: It wasn’t like I ever thought it was going to be a giant blockbuster, [but] I was bummed that critics were particularly hard on it.

Taccone: It’s not a perfect movie, but I do believe it is trying to do several things at once. And with a movie like that, maybe it’s a little more complicated for a broader audience to know what it is off the bat. I think it also had the weight of being an SNL movie, with people deciding they knew what it was before they knew what it was. These are the kinds of things a director tells himself when their movie doesn’t open well.

Michaels: I had the same experience with Tommy Boy in the sense that I’m really proud of the movie, but the critics savaged it. And yet it always played really well, and 25 years later it’s still here. There’s a bunch of those kinds of movies that the critics will never embrace because they use another kind of standard, and anything that looks dumb will be reviewed as dumb. But dumb is a very important part of American culture and comedy—and what people say is dumb is often a code word for funny.

Rudolph: I was pretty accustomed to things that I knew were funny not being mainstream. It wasn’t until Bridesmaids that I experienced anything different. [Like MacGruber], we were making it for ourselves and hoping people would enjoy it. If you’re not making it for yourself, what’s the point?

Wiig: When I got to SNL, I was writing a sketch [and said] something like, “I’m not sure if people will think this is funny.” Will said, “You can’t write for other people. You have to write what you think is funny.” That stuck with me. I would rather fail on my own terms. I felt the same way with the movie.

Forte: I did learn a lesson: It’s much easier to live through your movie bombing when it’s something you have not made any compromises on. If we had taken steps to try to make it connect more with the mainstream audience and it didn’t do well, that would be hard to take. But we made exactly the movie we would want to see ourselves…. So fuck those fuckers.

In the years following the film’s release, however, Team MacGruber started to realize the film had drawn a cult audience—particularly in 2012, when, according to Taccone, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon producer Michael Shoemaker advised him to watch Fallon interview Anne Hathaway during an appearance to promote The Dark Knight Rises. Hathaway explained that she had initially been intimidated by that film’s director, Christopher Nolan—until she realized that she could tell he was in a good mood when he started quoting MacGruber.

Taccone: I was like, “Holy shit. That’s incredible.” The closer to that story is that my wife [director Marielle Heller] and I were at our first DGA dinner. And she’s like, “Christopher Nolan is there. You’ve got to go say hi to him.” So I went up to him and I said, “My name is Jorma. I directed this movie called MacGruber.” I said, “We’re going to do a sequel eventually. What do you think of this: When the director card comes up it just says, “Directed by Christopher Nolan” with an asterisk, and then at the end of the movie there’s another asterisk that says who actually directed it.” And he said, “Let me talk to my wife about it.”

Phillippe: A friend of a comedian would say to me, “Did you know Adam Sandler loves this movie?” I would hear it in comedy circles, that so-and-so just had a MacGruber screening party…I will run into prominent comedians who say it’s one of the funniest movies of the last 10 years.

Taccone: When Andy Samberg watched it for the first time, he told me he was jealous. That was the biggest compliment he could give me.

Forte: Every once in a while, you hear that people are starting to watch it. In my head for a long time, I felt people were saying that to me to make me feel better.

Phillippe: A movie born out of a 45-second sketch and now I’m talking to you 10 years later. I think that’s a win.

Wiig: I definitely have had people say to me, “You’ve got it, MacGruber.” I was shooting in Iceland and I had a couple of local people come up to me and say they love that movie MacGruber.

Meyers: You know who likes MacGruber? Everyone who has seen MacGruber.

Kilmer: I have not been informed. How wonderful.

In fact, the film has stood the test of time so well that Forte, Taccone, Solomon, and Michaels are developing a MacGruber TV series for Peacock, NBC’s forthcoming streaming service, that, in an ideal MacGruber-verse, would include the original core cast of Wiig and Phillippe.

Taccone: It is so funny to me. MacGruber, the dumbest pitch in the world, was 10 sketches on SNL, a Super Bowl commercial, a movie, and then a TV series.

Forte: It is such a bummer that Powers Boothe passed away [in 2017]. He was such a wonderful man. We definitely would have wanted to include him in a very major way in this new thing we’re trying to do. He was so perfect. I always felt bad; I always felt like we were corrupting him.

Phillippe: I’ve read three or four episodes, and they are uproariously funny.

Forte: I would hope we could do a cartoon version of it. I just want to do every form of it.

Taccone: I invited Christopher Nolan to the pilot read-through. And he sent the best fucking email. It’s kind of stellar. It was such an amazing way to start the read-through.

Taccone shared the email with Vanity Fair.

Christopher Nolan (MacGruber fan): Though I can’t be there in person to watch you take the first step of your odyssey—know that my spirit soars with you, and whilst it’s perhaps unfair to add to the great sense of responsibility you must already feel, I am duty bound to tell you—the world is waiting, the world is watching.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

— The Week the Cameras Stopped: TV in the COVID-19 Era
— Why Natalie Wood’s Daughter Is Confronting Robert Wagner About Wood’s Death
— Inside Rock Hudson’s Real-Life Relationship With Agent Henry Wilson
— How The Mandalorian Fought to Keep Baby Yoda From Being Too Cute
— A First Look at Charlize Theron’s Immortal Warrior in The Old Guard
— Back to the Future, Uncut Gems, and More New Titles on Netflix This Month
— From the Archive: How Rock Hudson and Doris Day Helped Define the Romantic Comedy

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