What would you do if you were the last person on Earth? How quickly would you lose your mind when there’s no one to talk to? The new Fox comedy The Last Man on Earth finds Will Forte playing Phil Miller, a man who could possibly be the last human being on the planet.

Forte created, executive produces, and stars in the comedy set to debut on March 1, 2015 and during the 2015 Television Critics Association press conference in Los Angeles, he discussed the logistics of pulling off a post-apocalyptic comedy and what viewers can expect from the first season of The Last Man on Earth.

The Plot: From writer/producer Will Forte (Nebraska, Saturday Night Live) and directors/producers Chris Miller and Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street), The Last Man on Earth is a new single-camera comedy that chronicles the life and adventures of an average guy – and humanity’s last hope – who discovers what life is like when no one is telling you what you can and cannot do.

The year is 2020, and after a deadly virus has swept the planet, only one man is left on earth: Phil Miller (Forte). He used to be just an average guy who loved his family and hated his job. Now, in his RV, Phil searches the country for other survivors. He has traveled to every city, every town, and every outpost in the United States, Mexico and Canada and has found no one. As he returns to his hometown of Tucson, Phil comes to the painful realization that he is almost certainly the last living being on the face of the earth. All he wants is for someone – anyone – to find him in Tucson – preferably a woman.

Will Forte Q&A

How much research did you do? Did you actually look into whether or not plumbing would still be going for years, how garbage would be collected, or did you just wing it and make stuff up?

Will Forte: “Well, it’s embarrassing the little amount of research we did. I basically watched that show Life After People several years ago and then kind of tried to remember what I had learned from that show. I always kind of thought that maybe I would do some research to make sure that all the information was accurate and kind of skipped that step. So, there are a bunch of wonderful writers in the room and they’re all very smart, but I have a feeling that they know as little about what would happen in this situation. It’s going to kind of be like, you know, if you know a lot about what would happen after it would be like if people from NASA watched Spaceballs. […]But there’s nothing that’s crazy inaccurate, to my knowledge. And, again, it’s not a high level of knowledge.”

Was the unintentional comedy of Life After People part of the inspiration for this series?

Will Forte: “Well, I’ll tell you what. That show, you know, I brought it up in kind of a joking manner, but it really is fascinating. […]And it’s just a fascinating situation. It’s such a great area for comedy because I love comedy where there’s a lot of tension and this idea seems to be, even though it’s very far-fetched, it seems very relatable because I think everybody has thought about ‘What would you do if you were the last person on Earth?’ So even though it’s a situation, it’s oddly relatable in that way. It’s such a wonderful, tense situation just inherent to the idea.

[…]It has been a very, very fun show to shoot because I get to do a lot of wish fulfillment stuff because I would imagine that men and women would have different ideas about what they would do if they were the last person on Earth. I think I would just go around and break stuff. It just has been really fun to break a lot of stuff.”

How does this world smell?

Will Forte: “Well, the world smells very nice. I think that the dead bodies have been sedentary for long enough that as long as you don’t poke them you’re probably safe.

We don’t really ever see dead bodies. We kind of avoid that subject.”

Do we find out what happened to the other people? Does the audience know? Does your character know?

Will Forte: “We don’t spend that much time talking about it. There has been a virus, just we never even talk about what the virus is but we don’t go too far into it. We’re just shooting our 10th episode and I don’t know that we ever do more than just casually mention it in conversation with myself because, as you know, I am the only person on the show.”

Phil, the character, is fantastically unkempt, quite unhygienic. Were there any discussions about how brown and murky his toilet pool can be and how much texture there can be to it?

Will Forte: “There was great discussion about that, yes. […]It felt like dealing with the toilet pool was not a potty humor-type situation. It’s, I think, one of the basic things, one of the first things that comes up is what happens when the plumbing all stops? What do you do? So we felt like that was a fun way to deal with that.”

A lot of your characters on SNL were very pop culturally-based. Are you going to be poking fun at any of the more famous “last man on Earth” type of movies like Charlton Heston in Omega Man??

Will Forte: “Oh, jeez. Well, you know, I have actually never seen Omega Man but wasn’t I Am Legend based on Omega Man? I did see I Am Legend.

It’s such a crazy situation that we try to handle it in a somewhat grounded way. But if you buy into the premise, then pretty much whatever happens after that is basically stuff that could actually happen.”

When are we going to see the zombies?

Will Forte: “There are no zombies.”

As the beard got longer, how did that seem to affect your life when you weren’t working, when you were just walking around? Did people react to you in different ways? then and so on?

Will Forte: “Oh, man, yes. There would be a lot of street crossings when I would walk up a block at night. Yeah, people would cross the street. […]Definitely, there’s a huge difference because it went a little bit past the hipster beard length.”

If you were in this situation, what would drive you crazier: being alone or being with someone who drives you nuts?

Will Forte: “I think being alone. Being alone, for sure. You know, obviously, I’ve never been in this situation but I can’t imagine the despair you would be in if you were alone and thought that there was nobody else out there and there would be nobody else, because then what does anything matter anymore, you know?”

You have a great way of both calling out and paying loving homage to Cast Away with the volleyball and other athletic balls. Did you begin by feeling that that movie kind of cheated, giving him something to talk to, and then realize how important that was to have those characters?

Will Forte: “In the very beginning, there was almost no dialogue until that scene. So that was the only dialogue. And then I think there was also the dialogue with the mannequin. Yeah, so it was a silent movie until that moment. Then we found ways to pepper in dialogue, which we tried to make seem somewhat believable.”

Will he uncover some conspiracies that mankind has always wondered about but couldn’t discover the answers to?

Will Forte: “That is something that has always fascinated me. Like, one of the questions that will come up from time to time is what would you do aside from smashing stuff? I would go and try to find out all the old secrets, go to the CIA headquarters and dig up the classified information. We don’t have anything involving that yet, but that’s something that’s always fascinated me.”

Is it a hydrogen disaster in that the buildings are all still standing and there’s just no life? Or there are collapsed buildings all over the place? And how much CGI do you have in removing birds, people, airplanes, et cetera?

Will Forte: “It pretty much just looks like what you see today with no people. We will find locations that have been…I think like a rec center that has a tennis court that had fallen into disrepair and had weeds growing up. So we’ll find locations like that, empty old swimming pools to make it look like that people haven’t been around for a while. But other than that, it’s basically just a dustier world. In lot of ways, what [executive producers/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller] thought from the beginning was it’s in some ways more beautiful because there’s not the pollution anymore. You can see the stars better at night. It’s beautiful – more beautiful in some ways.”

How easy was it to work with the network on a comedy this unusual?

Will Forte: “Working with FOX has been so wonderful because it was a crazy idea, and they were so supportive of this. All along the way I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to make us change it from this thing.’ And they were so supportive and really let us make this show that must terrify them because it’s a little different. It was really fun to get to do stuff that wasn’t chockfull of dialogue. I’m so appreciative to Dana and Gary and everybody at FOX for letting us actually do this crazy thing.”