As the series progressed, Doug took on an afterlife of his own.
Which begat the idea of Doug, the stoner who guessed it 92 percent correctly.
(Not bad for a wild guess on a mushroom trip!)
Doug Forcett’s portrait on display in Michael’s office on ‘The Good Place’.Justin Lubin/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
“In this show, I ended up not changing them.”
Now that Doug had a name, he needed a photo.
And Schur needed a model.
Noah Garfinkel and William Jackson Harper on ‘The Good Place’.NBC
Can you come to the Universal lot and do that?'"
Asked what made Garfinkel the perfect Doug, Schur issues twofold reasoning.
“A lot of it is his hair, right?
Noah Garfinkel and his ‘Good Place’ portrait.Noah Garfinkel
That looks like a ’70s kind of dude.”
(Garfinkel concurs: “My hair naturally balloons into a ’70s stoner haircut.
So I was like, ‘Yeah, this absolutely checks out.'")
There’s nothing wrong with this.
“That was probably in our heads when were trying to figure out who it should be.
That’s probably the biggest reason why we chose Noah.”
“The formality of it is really funny,” Schur notes.
[And] the plaque is a funny thing to memorialize.
It’s not, you know, ‘Nobel Prize Winner.’
It’s ‘Closest Guess.'”
(The date of that guess, Oct. 14, is a nod to the Great Departure onThe Leftovers.
It was like he was the most famous person on the entire set of the show."
As the series went on, Doug Forcett became an important part of the fabric ofThe Good Placeuniverse.
“That night, I ate a tremendous amount of food in fast bursts,” he reports.
“And I did, in fact, throw up when I got home.
And it was very late when we were shooting that, so I had also already eaten.”
It’s currently housed in a closet under his staircase.
He did, however, take it out to snap a self (selves?)
portrait, which you could see below.
It’s a fitting and fittingly meta conclusion to the story of Doug.
This is the closure for this thing has been happening for four years.
It was really fun.'"
And more than 92 percent perfect.
