Six years ago, Will Forte was wrapping work on a horror indie in Ireland when he learned that The Last Man on Earth—the Emmy-nominated Fox sitcom he created, produced, and starred in for four seasons—was not being picked up for more episodes.

For some, the news might’ve been a blow to the ego or heart. But for the Saturday Night Live alum, it was what he had been secretly wishing for.

“As much fun as I was having with people, and as much as I loved everybody, there was a good part of me that was just praying for it to end every year because I couldn’t handle it physically and emotionally,” says the actor in a phone call from Dublin, where he was set to attend a special screening of his new Netflix series, Bodkin.

By 2015, the year that The Last Man on Earth premiered, Forte had experience as a writer (Late Show With David Letterman, 3rd Rock From the Sun, many an MTV Movie Awards show), a performer (he did eight seasons on SNL), and an enthusiastically inept MacGyver type (named MacGruber, an SNL character who got a 2010 spin-off movie and would later land an eight-episode Peacock series). But Forte found himself out of his depth on The Last Man on Earth, juggling multiple jobs on a show whose postapocalyptic conceit meant he would have minimal costars.

“I thought, Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord] and I came up with this idea together. Of course I’ll do that—without having any idea how much work it was,” says Forte. “I’m a little bit of a control freak. After the first year, I delegated better. I would have this amazing team of writers that were there, and these great editors. But I just took on too much…It was pretty overwhelming. I agreed with myself, I’ll never do this again in this way, but I’m going to gut it out and see it through until it’s canceled…. It was tough.”

When the cancellation came in 2018, says Forte, “there was a lot of relief, and I thought, Okay, now I can resume life again. Days after finding out, I was in a van driving solo through the countryside of Ireland. It was a very powerful thing—being in this car, driving the wild Atlantic way, sorting out things, feeling this freedom, listening to my tunes, driving on this magical land. It was really very healing.”

The experience, plus other extraordinary trips to Ireland before and since, imbued Forte with such a deep and abiding love for the country that, when he heard there was a part for him in Netflix’s Ireland-set mystery thriller Bodkin, his first thought was, “It’s going to have to be really bad for me to not do it…. The real entry point for me was just saying the word Ireland.” (Forte, who seems compulsively polite, quickly points out that the scripts for Bodkin ended up being “fantastic.”)

In Bodkin, Forte plays an American true-crime podcaster named Gilbert who joins forces with a local Irish journalist (Siobhán Cullen) and a research assistant (Robyn Cara) to solve a mystery in which they become entangled. The show, like the podcast its characters are making, scratches the itch for a true-crime story set in a small, coastal town. But there are also oddball elements woven in, like a scene in which a longtime criminal smuggler cheers up Forte’s dejected character by dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” on a bridge.

“I didn’t realize how funny it was going to be,” Forte says of the show. “It’s got twists and turns, always keeps you guessing. It’s the kind of thing I usually like to watch.”

Forte didn’t do much research for the role—he’s American (hailing from Northern California), has been a guest on podcasts, and has dabbled in the true-crime genre. He brushes off any talk about his performance, saying that the part from Bodkin creator Jez Sharf was written “so well that somebody could come from outer space and read it.”

The quirky mystery is the first dramatic series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, which Forte says was another perk of the project. Alas, the former president and first lady, who are executive producers on Bodkin, were not weighing in on dialogue themselves. “They have a lot of people from their company who are on set every day,” says Forte. “They work with super-intelligent, creative people. Very positive thoughts on Higher Ground and everybody who works there.”

Because Forte was attached to Bodkin solely as an actor, rather than as a multihyphenate rainmaker, he was able to enjoy the leisurely group hangs that followed shoots in Union Hall. “You’d meet up for dinners, and it was this fun way to get even closer to these people you’re already close to,” he says, noting that he was able to reunite with the cast and crew in Dublin the week he was speaking to me. Given the chunk of time he spent in the country filming Bodkin, Forte estimates that he’s spent a full calendar year of his life in Ireland.

“I feel this real connection to this country. The first couple times I came here, I was dealing with a different emotional situation each time. And I would just go explore the countryside and had a lot of time with myself,” says Forte. (His mother accompanied him on one road trip, in what turned out to be a “really fun mother-son bonding experience.”) “I suppose I always think about Ireland and think about personal growth.”

Setting up a home base on the Emerald Isle for Bodkin was an especially fulfilling experience given how much Forte’s life has changed since 2018, when he was drained from The Last Man on Earth and didn’t have any semblance of a personal life. “I’m now married and had a little girl, Zoe, who’s three, and then we had a baby on the way,” says Forte. “So my wife [visited] for the first time, and it was so fun to share all my favorite places with her and my kid.”

Asked how fatherhood has changed his attitude toward his career, Forte says, “It does make me realize how embarrassed I’ll be when [my] kids do look at some of the things I’ve done.” The actor has spoken previously about a certain movie scene that might be one of those things: the one from MacGruber in which his character distracts a mark by walking around with a celery stalk sticking out of his derriere. The movie lost his mom some friends, he previously said, and the celery bit was a focal point of A.O. Scott’s scathing New York Times review, in which the critic wondered, “Why does this film exist?”

I ask how he will explain the notorious celery scene to his children. Forte affects grave seriousness. “We haven’t had the talk yet, no,” he tells me, as if he’s referring to a terminal diagnosis. Back to normal, he says, “I feel like I’ll figure it out in the moment.”

For the most part, Forte says his taste in entertainment overlaps with that of his kids: “I love getting a chance to do voices in animated movies if I’m given the opportunity,” says the actor, who has voiced characters ranging from Abraham Lincoln in The Lego Movie to a sea captain painting on Late Night With Seth Meyers. But he backs up the conversation to make one point clear: “Having kids is not going to stop me from always trying to do another MacGruber.”

Forte has logged a lot of thinking time since his Last Man on Earth days. “The older I get, the more I realize I just want to have fun while working. And MacGruber is this collection of some of my best friends,” he says of a team that includes fellow SNL alums Jorma Taccone, who created the titular character, and Kristen Wiig, who plays MacGruber’s love interest, Vicki St. Elmo. “Doing MacGruber means that we are forced to be together for a couple months, just laughing with each other. Everyone’s lives are so busy that you don’t always get the chance to be together in that way.”

Those special acting experiences are what Forte wants to replicate. “I look now at Bodkin as being another one,” says Forte, noting that the people he worked with ended up being as much of a draw as the location. “I would love it if it did well and we could do a second season.”