Will Forte could very well be the next US star to relocate to Australia if his new show proves to be a hit.
The US comedian stars in the new Stan Original series, “Sunny Nights”, which was filmed in Sydney over three months last year.
In the show, Forte stars as straight-laced Martin, who teams up with his sister, Vicki (D’Arcy Carden), who set up a spray tan business in Sydney called Tansform, where his estranged wife lives. But as Martin and Vicki attempt to turn their company from a start-up operating out of the back of a van into a multi-million-dollar empire, the siblings become tangled up in Sydney’s criminal underworld, and when a ruthless gangster begins to catch up with them, the two must figure out how to stay alive, out of prison, and in the black.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ, the 55-year-old actor said he “fell in love” with Sydney while in town.
“I got to meet this person who will be family for the rest of my life in D’Arcy Carden. Her and her husband, Jason, lived down there the whole time,” Forte said.
“We would hang out all the time. It was fantastic. The crew was unbelievably wonderful, just so good at what they did. Each one of them, you could go on vacation with. Man, I loved it. I look back on it, I could talk about ‘Sunny Nights’ for hours and hours.”
Should the show get greenlit for a second season, Forte said coming back to Australia would be an easy decision.
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“The tricky thing is my daughter is now old enough that she’s actually going into a school where it’s a little more important that she’s there all the time,” he said. “We got lucky, we were able to put her into a local school… it was in Rose Bay, this delightful school, and she fit in with everybody, and we loved it there. It’s not as simple as ‘Oh, come over for the weekend or a week’ or whatever.
“We would make it happen because there’s no way I would not be a part of this again, and I think we’d probably try to bring the whole family down just because I couldn’t be away from them for that long. Australia brought out the best in all of us.
“Darcy and I talk about it all the time, just like, ‘We could live there. Why don’t we move to Sydney?’ We’re both from Northern California, so right outside San Francisco. The whole harbour area reminds us of San Francisco. It’s just the best of everything all wrapped into one, so it’s all felt very familiar, but was totally new at the same time. I loved it. I just can’t say enough about it.”
‘Sunny Nights’ is streaming on Stan now.