"It's fun to say, 'Wife,'" Will Forte said, and then he told the story: five months after the birth of their first child, he and Olivia Modling slipped into a backyard in New Mexico and married on July 31, 2021.
They had met at a mutual friend's party in 2018, started dating that year and were engaged in 2019. The couple planned to marry in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic shifted those plans; Zoe arrived in February 2021 and, as Forte put it, they married five months later in a decision that happened almost on a whim.
Forte has described the wedding as deliberately small and sudden. While he was filming in New Mexico, he said, families were already planning to visit and "we realized, 'Oh, all the people that we would want to be here are going to be here.' Most of them, because a lot of my closest friends work on MacGruber with me." He recalled: "They were already in Albuquerque, so we just decided very last minute, 'Let's just have this wedding, surprise my parents.' They didn't even know until they pulled into the parking lot. And we just had this really fun, delightful wedding, pretty small, in the back of Jorma Taccone's house."
The timing underscores how quickly Forte's personal life changed. Zoe's February 2021 birth preceded the July ceremony; the family later expanded with a second daughter, Cecilia, and in 2024 Forte summarized his situation plainly: he was a father of two. He has also said, wryly, "I'm a 50-year-old father. Which is pretty old for a father."
Forte's remarks about Modling have been straightforward and affectionate. He called her "the most patient, understanding woman in the world" and said he felt "very happy and very lucky these days." He has also offered lighter moments — joking about FaceTiming her and seeing freshly cut bangs, and quipping that he had "finally found my Ted Danson."
Modling herself keeps a low public profile. Reports note that she works in distribution and brand partnerships and that she previously worked at Synergy Global Entertainment, a company that filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Beyond those traces, her exact birthday and a fuller public résumé are not part of the public record.
The arc of their relationship is compact: meeting and dating in 2018, engagement in 2019, a pandemic-induced postponement in 2020, the arrival of Zoe in February 2021, and a surprise backyard wedding on July 31, 2021 — a sequence that compressed courtship, parenthood and marriage into three intense years.
For anyone typing will forte wife into a search bar: Will Forte is married to Olivia Modling. They arranged a private, last-minute ceremony in New Mexico on July 31, 2021, five months after Zoe's birth, and have since welcomed a second daughter, Cecilia. What remains the clearest unanswered detail is not when they wed or how many children they have, but the finer points of Modling's personal biography — her exact birthday and a full public employment history remain private.
