Instead of The Last Man on Earth, his new Fox series set in 2022 and debuting Sunday, Will Forte came thisclose to pitching a premise based on his real-life bromance with MacGruber co-star Val Kilmer.

Kilmer, who has played everyone from Jim Morrison to Batman to Moses, was seeking a home near Hollywood when he showed up on Forte's doorstep. "He needed a new place in Malibu so he stayed with me while he was looking," Forte said last night at the Last Man on Earth preview screening at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City. "And it was delightful. I thought it was going to be a couple days. It was a couple months off and on. We were gonna do something based on that." The team that produced Forte's new show includes Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the men behind The Lego Movie who also brought together Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill for the Jump Street franchise). In return for the hospitality, Forte even contemplated asking Kilmer to play himself. "We might have tried to get him to do it. Why not?"

But it was not meant to be. "At the last second—Chris was actually putting on his jacket to leave—one of us just pitched that last-man-on-earth idea one more time. The first incarnation was like, shitty, so it just seemed jokey and we just breezed by it. And then something just clicked and we brought it up in a more grounded way, and it just started pouring out. For 10 minutes we just jammed out five pages of ideas and then they took off and I kept jamming it out." For instance, outliving humanity comes with the perks of ignoring stop signs and laying claim to the Heisman Trophy.

Earlier this month, Kilmer was released from the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center after being checked in for a throat "complication." Hopefully, he'll hit up Forte for future chicken-noodle-soup runs.

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