Will Forte Reveals Pepsi Scrapped a MacGruber Super Bowl Commercial

In 2009, the marketing folks at Pepsi approached Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels about collaborating on an ad for Super Bowl XLIII. After Michaels pitched the idea of featuring Will Forte's high-octane MacGruber, the sodamaker quickly backed out of the deal—albeit only temporarily. As Forte now recalls, Pepsi wanted nothing to do with the MacGyver parody until Michaels, Forte, and a full Hollywood crew went ahead and filmed three commercials anyway to pitch the company.

"Pepsi had approached Lorne and said, 'Hey, do you want to take an SNL sketch and turn it into a commercial,' and somehow he picked MacGruber. When he told Pepsi that MacGruber was what he wanted to go with, they quickly bowed out and said, 'You know what, maybe we don't want to do a Super Bowl commercial,'" Forte said on a recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast.

In total, the group filmed three commercials. After seeing them, Pepsi agreed to air one of them, just days before the game, nonetheless. The other commercials then went on to air during the Saturday Night Live broadcast the following week.

He added, "So, Lorne said, 'You know what, let's keep making this thing and just make it good enough that they'll want to do it.' So we said alright and rallied the troops and we did it and brought Richard Dean Anderson in. We decided because there was no guarantee this would go anywhere, we would make a sketch for the show at the same time. So, we got to hang around with him for a whole day once, and he was so cool."

Is MacGruber coming back?

After the SNL sketch became a feature film, Peacock waited a decade and some change to continue the story through an original MacGruber series on streaming. According to Forte, a second season of the Peacock show is already written.

"As far as from our end, let us at it," Forte said about a new season of the series. "We finished the first season and then they let us start writing the second season and the stuff that we were coming up with was really, really fun and we love it. But then at a certain point...the term of that ran out and then we were just kind of hanging around waiting for an answer and we never had any kind of answer saying that we weren't doing a second season. But at this point, if they wanted us to do a second season, I think they probably would have said something."