Will Forte’s long-time Saturday Night Live mainstay MacGruber can often be defined by the strength of his antagonists. And we’re not just talking about the Val Kilmer-ish supervillains that everyone’s favorite Ranger/SEAL/Green Beret typically battles against, but pretty much every halfway sane person he runs into. If you are a regular human being, and you are forced to spend more than 30 seconds in conversation with MacGruber, you probably count as an antagonist.
Which is why it’s genuinely exciting to see some of the talent that NBC and Peacock are lining up for the upcoming MacGruber TV show, in addition to a returning Forte, Kristen Wiig, and Ryan Phillippe. Specifically, Variety reports today that Sam Elliott, Laurence Fishburne, and Mickey Rourke have all signed on for the series, where they’ll play MacGruber’s dad, general, and enemy, respectively.
Damn, that sounds like fun.
To be specific, the fantastically mustachioed Elliott will be playing the senior MacGruber, Perry, who has a fractured relationship with his bombastically idiotic son. Rourke, meanwhile, will play bad guy Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth, a mysterious figure from MacGruber’s past who threatens to destroy the world at large. (Does Queeth have something to do with Dieter Von Cunth, Kilmer’s villain from the film? Probably not, but at least Forte and friends’ villain-naming conventions are still firmly intact.)
Our favorite casting detail, though, is the addition of Fishburne as General Barrett Fasoose, who is not only a high-ranking military officer—he’s also the guy who married MacGruber’s ex-wife, Vicki (Wiig), in between the series and the movie. The sheer amount of petulant nonsense that opens the door for is enough to gets us excited for this show all over again. No word yet when the eight-episode series will finally be ready to deliver on all this promised goodness, but it’ll be on Peacock when it does.