Day One Intermission heads will know that I'm a Day One Saturday Night Live UK head. I became convinced of the show's capacity for greatness in the first episode - specifically, when I saw the "45 Seconds with Fouracres" sketch, in which the cast member for which it's named, George Fouracres, quickly rolled through some strangely specific and spot-on Irish grandad impersonations. For me, it was the first real glimpse of what the show would become - an edgier, and, yes, funnier, version of the world's leading sketch comedy institution.
Fouracres, a 35-year-old comedic actor from Wolverhampton, has been right at the forefront. He's played Keir Starmer in the show's broad cold opens, and taken things in a fascinatingly surreal direction in late-in-the-episode sketches, perhaps most notably in a riff on a sinister 1980s ad for British pork. In it, Fouracres plays the actor in the advertisement, who is encouraged to take things in a "more frightening direction" by the British Pork Board, which is made up of a woman in a pig mask, a man covered in bacon, and a man with strings of sausages wrapped around his neck. Surreal, I told you. That the sketch was a passion project for Fouracres will tell you plenty about him. "I do have a very strange brain," he says, over coffee in east London.
Ahead of SNL UK returning next week (it's live on Sky One on Saturday nights from 12 September), Fouracres and I spoke about pork, going full Arthur Miller with Aimee Lou Wood in the Mario sketch, and how he really, genuinely came close to quitting the industry the year before he landed this job.
GQ: There was a lot of negativity ahead of SNL UK starting. But as soon as it debuted, it was quite obvious that it worked. How did that feel?
George Fouracres: I did understand the preemptive negativity, because I think people thought they were going to get an American offering with a UK label on it. People don't generally respond well to that here. And believe you me, I was absolutely terrified running up to that first show. Not because I didn't believe in what we were doing or didn't think it was good, but just because the alchemy of everything going well is so delicate. And I'm really chuffed that it did [work] in the end.
At the Edinburgh TV Festival, [Director of Sky Arts] Phil Edgar Jones said the show is Sky's best watched among young people.
I think it's lovely, that. You have people pop up to you in the street and say, "Oh, I really like the show, blah, blah, blah." But one of the loveliest things for me has been that you will get 20-year-old kids and then 60-year-olds saying that they really love it.
I loved the pork ad sketch that you led on, because it was very weird - and it felt like the kind of thing that could only happen on the British version of this show. How did that come to pass?
I had been obsessed with that advert for years, since I was a kid basically, because it was like a viral clip on YouTube. It became a vocal tic where I was just always like, [doing the voice] "Pork for lunch on Sunday." It's just so terrifying. In the first few days of working together, I think it was Ania Magliano who said "Is it too early to show each other our favourite YouTube clips?" I was like, "Have you seen the pork one?" Then we wrote a sketch about it, about, like, what if the [actor] doing it was the only one who was normal? All these sinister forces are trying to make this terrifying advert.
It seems to have had a cult-y response.
I think because it already has a cult awareness of that advert on the internet for the last 20 years, because it's so sinister.
I loved the Mario sketch, too. Did you write it?
No, that was Louis Waymouth, Chris Cantrill and Humphrey Ker. We were doing it because Aimee Lou Wood is a mate of mine in real life from the theatre and stuff. She was like, "Oh, it's good that we've got this opportunity to really act together." And Tom Parry, our director, was like, "Yeah, I want you to really do this like it's an Arthur Miller play." We really went there with that one.
There's a moment where I'm miming jumping up and down on someone's head with a wrench, and I nearly drop it. As I was doing it, I was imagining my family at home reacting to what I was doing, because it was so recognisable as something my grandad would do if he was really angry. He had these mad hand movements that didn't really make any sense, but it really emphasised the point.
Your Irish accents in the "45 seconds with Fouracres" sketch are genuinely great. How did that one come about?
I'm part Irish on my dad's side, and I think we've all seen bad Irish impressions on British TV. I would never have done that whole sketch at all if it hadn't been for Tina Fey. I did it in my audition [and] screen test. I'd done a series of uncles, basically - because you have to show different voices you can do and stuff. The way of demonstrating all the Irish ones was just all these old boys from my youth, my grandad's friends at pigeon club, stuff like that. And they were like, "Oh, it would be useful if we had this 45-second format". But I also was like, "I need to send up a flare here to Ireland so that they know it's an inside gag." So I stuck [Irish folk song] "Óró sé do bheatha abhaile" in.
It was important that you got it right, 'cause SNL US has a long history of doing the Irish dirty...
It is just different here because we're still neighbours, and also as a British person of Irish descent you really ought to know your history. I'm half Catholic and half Protestant, so I'm up on those things. [Laughs]
Have you spent much time in Ireland?
I was there a couple of weeks ago. One of my best friends over in Ireland passed away sadly, earlier this year - [the] amazing Irish actor Michael Patrick. A bunch of us all went over to see his wife, Naomi, and remember him, which was really lovely.
I'm sorry, that's awful.
Yeah, it was tough. That happened in week four of the show. It's a tough environment to be in when you've just lost somebody. It's hard work. One of the last things between us was that he was watching the show. And then you do the show that week and it's like the first one he's not seeing. He was happy about the show. I'm happy he got to see "What kind of Irish is your grandad?" He said it was the most me thing he'd ever seen. [Laughs]
You've been in this industry a long time, so you know exactly how hard it is to make something that is both well-liked and well-watched.
Yeah. It's fucking hard work, constantly. And I did nearly give up, not very long ago.
Really?
Yeah. At the start of 2024. I was like, I really genuinely think I have to stop now. I just got to this point where months would go by [without work], and I was like, I can't keep doing this. I was working at [Shakespeare's] Globe a lot, but obviously there's then like five or six months of the year when you're not there. It was never sustainable, and it's expensive living here, and I don't come from money. And I was like, I've got to start being responsible. But then as with all these things, so much of it is luck. And I was lucky that year. I was cast very last minute in a sitcom called The Franchise, and then I was cast in a movie called Steve with Cillian Murphy. Those two things saved me. My friend put it like, "You have to keep just holding onto the car as it flies down the road with your fingers attached to the bumper."
How were your comedy tastes shaped when you were growing up?
I think the main things from really early on that shaped it were The Muppets and The Simpsons and Cartoon Network, stuff like that. And then later into my teens, flash videos, like Weebl's Stuff and Salad Fingers - the real corners of the 2006 internet.
Were you a big SNL guy, too?
Yeah. I used to think when I was 21, it was my deliberately unachievable dream, but I was like, "I wish I was the first. I wish I was a British cast member of SNL US," because it was safe, because I knew I could never achieve it. So then when I got the opportunity to audition for the UK one, I was like, "Well, maybe I just shouldn't, because otherwise the likelihood of this actually happening is so incredibly low that I'll be dashing a dream that I've had for a really long time, that was meant to be untouchable because it was never going to come true." So it is really insane that it's actually happened. I've still not really got over that.
Before we wrap up, I wanted to mention Keir Starmer. Your tenure playing him on the show has surely finished along with his premiership.
Well, it looks like it. It was really considerate of the Labour Party to line up their leadership contest with our series. That was very good of them.
What did you enjoy most about playing him?
I think it was being physically transformed into him. Because everybody in the hair and make-up department spent ages getting his hair just right. Kevin [Fortune, Head of Wigs] would be like, "I was watching him on the news this week, and his parting is slightly further off to one side, so we need to move it a bit." The level of detail was crazy.
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