Will Forte Once Thought Having a Family Wasn’t ‘in the Cards.’ Now, Life as a Dad ‘Is the Best Thing Ever’ (Exclusive)

Will Forte tells PEOPLE all about life as a father of two young daughters, whom he and wife Olivia Modling have welcomed in the last five years. ‘I thought that I was not going to have kids, but I always wanted to have kids,’ he says.

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Will Forte tells PEOPLE all about life as a father of two young daughters, whom he and wife Olivia Modling have welcomed in the last five years

Forte and Modling met via a mutual friend in 2018, got engaged in 2019 and married in a surprise ceremony in 2021

The actor and comedian says he feels “very excited to be able to share” his new movie Coyote vs. Acme with his daughters

Will Forte started his family at a later stage in life, but he’s finding life as a parent worth the wait.

“I thought that I was not going to have kids, but I always wanted to have kids, and I just got to a certain age, and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not in the cards,’ ” Forte, 56, tells PEOPLE, while discussing his excitement for the release of Coyote vs. Acme, a new (and rare) family-friendly comedy in the actor’s résumé. “So, when I met my now wife, it all happened pretty quickly. Like, ‘Oh my God, the opportunity still arises.’ ”

Forte and his wife Olivia Modling first met at a mutual friend’s party in 2018, as a source told PEOPLE in 2020, and they got engaged in 2019. The couple share two daughters, Zoe, 5, and Cecilia, 3, and they got married in a surprise ceremony in New Mexico in 2021, while Forte filmed his MacGruber Peacock series.

“Did I wanna have kids 20 years ago? For sure. But to get this experience, to be a dad is the best thing ever,” Forte says. “You got your hands full all hours, every day, but it’s the best.”

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Forte filmed his new movie Coyote vs. Acme in 2022, after he and Modling, who works in distribution and brand partnerships, welcomed their oldest daughter and got married.

In the years since, the project has turned heads in Hollywood simply because it never hit theaters on time. In 2023, Warner Bros. seemingly shelved the project for good, but the studio sold the movie to Ketchup Entertainment in March 2025.

Forte says that seeing the movie for the first time — after he learned that Warner Bros. did not intend to release it whatsoever — “was an especially tough thing to take, knowing that this was a movie that I could share with my kids, and thinking that not only could they not see it, but at that point, we just thought they were gonna destroy it.”

Coyote vs. Acme is a live-action-animation hybrid that melds Looney Tunes‘ cartoon world with humans. For Forte, who gained fame playing all manner of silly, ridiculous characters on Saturday Night Live in the 2000s, it offers a rare opportunity to sit down in a theater with his daughters to show them what his life is like in front of the camera.

“It is so fun to share every moment with them, but to this kind of thing — there are so many things that I do that they can either never see till they’re old or just that I hope they never see,” he says, with a laugh. “I can’t imagine my kids watching MacGruber. This is a thing I’m very excited to be able to share with them.”

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Ketchup Entertainment

That isn’t to say there aren’t any SNL sketches Forte can show his daughters, once they’re old enough. He remembers a 2007 sketch with Peyton Manning in which the pair portray basketball coaches speaking to their players at halftime.

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“He gets up and we dance together, but it’s just an insane dance. I feel like that would probably be the thing to start them with, because it’s just a lot of jumping around, doing a dumb dance,” Forte reasons. “I feel like they might not get the jokes in the beginning yet, but to see Dad being a goofball jumping around, I think, would be a fun place to start.”

Coyote vs. Acme hits theaters Aug. 28.

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