When the American incarnation of The Office launched, fans of the original were skeptical that
any stateside actor could do justice to the role of the smarmy, delusional boss
played by Ricky Gervais, and his creepily intense, almost feral sidekick,
played by Mackenzie Crook. But it didn't take long for Steve Carell (in the boss
role) and Rainn Wilson (as the sidekick) to make those characters their own. The
Office has grown in popularity, and Wilson
has branched out with scene-stealing supporting roles in films like The
Last Mimzy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and last year's surprise smash hit Juno. Wilson recently picked up his second Best
Supporting Actor Emmy nomination for his work on The Office.
Before The Office, Wilson logged
appearances on Six Feet Under and
in movies like Galaxy Quest, Almost Famous, and BAADASSSSS! In The Rocker, Wilson makes his leading-man film debut as a drummer dumped
by his '80s hair-metal outfit, only to find success decades later playing in a
band alongside his teenage nephew. The A.V. Club recently spoke
with Wilson about film projects that never made it to the finish line, having
children quote his Juno dialogue
back to him in malls, The Rocker, and the complicated psychology of Dwight Schrute.
The A.V. Club: When it
comes to film, are you deliberately seeking roles that differ from Dwight Schrute
on The Office?
DW: Well yeah, I think Dwight is
a very distinct character. I think definitely people know me from playing
creeps and weirdoes, and I'm definitely looking to expand my range. I started
in theatre, and for me, it was all about transformation. You transform into the
character that you're playing. You're not like Jerry Seinfeld, who's always
playing himself no matter what he's in—he's great at doing it, but I'm a
different kind of actor. I found it very easy to transform into creeps and
weirdoes and losers and goofballs, and I'm happy to play eccentric kinds of
characters, and I have a great affinity for the outsider, but I definitely am
about expanding my range as well.
AVC: Big stars tend to play the same role over and over. Character
actors have more leeway, but even they tend to play the same role.
RW: But now we're in the day
where there's a lot of character actors that have become stars. Both on the
comedy side, like Will Ferrell and Jack Black, but you also have Paul Giamatti
and Philip Seymour Hoffman playing lead roles, and transforming themselves in
some really cool, great performances. So things have opened up a lot in the
last couple of years, and I think audiences are willing to accept character men
in a lot of different kinds of roles.
AVC: The Last Mimzy was
certainly a departure for you.
RW: Yeah, I still think it's a
very nice, very daring little family film, in that it's dealing with a lot of
advanced ideas underneath. It has metaphysics and genetics and science fiction.
AVC: It's very trippy for a kid's film.
RW: Yeah, and it didn't really
find an audience, but I loved the script, and that's always going to be my
first thing, if I get sent the script and I respond to it. But I did like
playing a northwest hippie-type elementary-school science teacher who gets to
go on this mystical journey—it's about as different from Dwight as you
can get, and it really was a lot of fun.
AVC: Fish, your character in The Rocker, is very different from Dwight Schrute, but they
share this intensity and unshakable belief in themselves. Do you think that's
the character, or something you inherently bring to roles?
RW: Well, I think there are
similarities between Fish and Dwight. Definitely. I think they're both
oblivious in different ways, but I think that's a good thing, because I think
Dwight fans, who we'll be trying to lure out of their houses from watching Office reruns to go see The Rocker,
need to be compelled to see the film. They like to see me do a certain thing,
right? So they want to see something similar to that—it's not like they
want to go out of their houses and pay $10.50 to see me play Hamlet. So they're
both characters with big blind spots that think very highly of themselves, and
they have to have that in common, and I hope that works in my favor.
AVC: According to the IMDB, you play "College Professor" in the
upcoming Transformers sequel. Is
your character also an automobile?
RW: I didn't make automobile, but
my character is kind of a Vespa that transforms into a small kitchen appliance.
I'm not sure which one.
AVC: And then it transforms into a college professor.
RW: Yeah, so it works out on a
much smaller scale.
AVC: How did your role in Juno
come about?
RW: I have a great relationship
with Jason Reitman, and I had done this really terrible comedy with his dad
[Ivan], My Super Ex-Girlfriend. I was in Vancouver shooting The
Last Mimzy, and Thank You For
Smoking had just come out. I was sitting in
a Starbucks, and a young man walks in and he goes [Affects fast voice.], "Hi
there. I don't know if you know me but my name's Jason Reitman and you just
worked with my dad and I want to do a movie with you where you play a ninja
that lives in the San Fernando Valley." And I felt like I was discovered at
Schwab's, or something like that, and I was like, "Okay, cool." And then a
month or two later, we met in L.A. and talked about what he had in mind and his
vision for it, and then we talked about hiring writers, and I was like, "Jason,
just give me a shot at writing this movie. I've never written anything like
that before, and it could suck, and if it sucks, we'll throw it away and hire a
real writer, but let me do it." So about a year ago, I finished the first
draft—I had very little time to spend writing screenplays—and I'm
really happy with it. It's really good; it definitely needs some work, it needs
a new ending, so I've been working on the second draft. I'm getting ready to
hand it in to Jason in the next month or two, and hopefully maybe in 2009, we'll
be shooting that movie. It's called Bonzai Shadowhands.
AVC: And that led directly to appearing in Juno as Rollo?
RW: Right. In the midst of all
that, Jason was getting Juno ready. It's a project he had been
chasing for a long time, because he really loved the script. He just called me
and was like, "Look, could you do me a favor and fly to Vancouver for a day and
do the part of the convenience-store clerk?" And he was like "Please," and I
was all "No," and he was like "Pretty please," and I was like "Okay." So it was
one day's work, and I got paid $750. I think that's SAG Canadian one-day
minimum, and the movie has grossed $800 million.
AVC: It's kind of inconceivable how much money that film has actually made.
RW: Yeah, I think it cost him $11
or $12 million, and at this point, I think it's over the $150 million mark.
AVC: Do you have people quoting your dialogue to you?
RW: Yeah, what's interesting to
me is that a couple times there have been kids who are like, 11, that are a
little too young for The Office but who love Juno, and I'll be walking through a mall with my son, and
there will be kids going, "Hey, homeskillet! Your eggo is preggo." And I'm
like, "Juno? You're quoting Juno? For my one-day? My $750?"
AVC: That character makes an indelible impression.
RW: I don't know about that, man,
I just showed up and tried to get my lines right. Jason just told me to play it
real, and I tried my best with that dialogue to keep it as real as possible. [Laughs.]
Because I say some pretty outrageous stuff.
AVC: It's odd seeing such an intense relationship between a
convenience-store clerk and one of his customers.
RW: Well, I think he knows her. She
comes in every day to buy her Sunny Delight. She's shoplifted before, and I
think she's given him a hard time before, so I don't think the antagonism is a
fabrication of an anonymous interaction. I think there's a little bit of
history there.
AVC: There's also a lot of sexual tension.
RW: Sexual tension… I think Ellen
Page is hott, double-t hott. All
that sexual tension will probably be on the 25th-anniversary DVD as the torrid
erotic scenes between Rollo and Juno. I think they bathe in a bathtub of Sunny
D and get it on.
AVC: Steve Carell is on record as having never seen the British Office, but you were a big fan.
RW: Yeah.
AVC: Was it difficult to not be influenced by the actor who played the
equivalent to your role?
RW: I get asked that question a
lot, no offense, but the situation was—the guy playing Gareth is very
distinct. He looks like a whippet, he's 97 pounds and has very intense eyes and
demeanor, and I knew I'd never be able to copy him. We have totally different
energies and are very different as actors. He's just absolutely brilliant for
what he did. I knew for the American show, what we were going for was Seinfeld-like
success. People who compare the English and American Offices—there's so much ignorance in that comparison,
because the English Office made 13
episodes. We make that many episodes in three months. We've made 89 episodes at
this point. Their show is more like a miniseries, and our show is like an
American TV show, because the demands of the market are so different.
It's like comparing a book and a movie. Gone With The Wind the movie and Gone With The Wind the book, it's difficult to compare them, because
they're different forms. So I knew that ours needed to sustain, but I also knew
that the Dwight needed to play a similar role, and I knew that [Steve Carell's]
Michael Scott needed an acolyte and a foil, and I knew that Jim [Halpert, John
Krasinski's character] needed someone to butt heads against. I knew that the
office needed someone who was a real stickler for rules, and at the same time
was a nerd and had weird, oddly obsessive-compulsive ideas about the military
and gaming and fantasy worlds, but also needed to be a real in to the
hierarchies of office life. I also didn't want him to be—one thing I
really appreciated about the character of Gareth was that he wasn't a loser. The
guy had a lot of friends, he could go to bars, he could get girls. He wasn't
like the office nerd that we've seen so many times before, so I knew
that—this is a very long-winded answer—I knew there were certain
needs that needed to be fulfilled. I wanted to find my own way of doing that. I
wanted to find my own bad haircut, my own way of kissing the boss' ass, my own
way of butting heads with Jim, and so I tried to forget Gareth as much as I
could.
[pagebreak]
AVC: Dwight is very loyal to Michael, yet he also goes behind his back
and tries to get him fired.
RW: I remember writing [American Office
creator-producer] Greg [Daniels] this e-mail early on. After the pilot, I had a
concern I would just be the annoying nerd. I wrote Greg, and I was like, "I
just want to make sure that the direction we're going in with Dwight is that
I'm not just the predictable annoying nerd, and that I have some more
interesting stuff to do. Is there a more interesting way to explore this
character?" He wrote me back the greatest e-mail, this really articulate, very
long treatise on Dwight, in which he talked about how Dwight had this teenage
love of hierarchies, and that his family was very clannish. And as soon as he
said those things, a lot of pieces just fell into place. I think it makes total
sense for Dwight, having a teenage love of hierarchies and a very clannish
family. It allows him to be so loyal that he'd throw himself on a grenade for
Michael Scott, and also at the same time, a second later, try to stab him in
the back and take his job, because he's just wired that way.
AVC: Can you tell us anything about the Office spin-off?
RW: Yes, it stars me. It's called Schrute To Kill, and I'm a mercenary for hire like Blackwater,
and I get into all kinds of comic misadventures all around the globe. So we'll
be shooting a lot in Kabul.
AVC: Is a lot of it in front of a green screen?
RW: No, we're going to many actual
locations—Latvia, the mountains of Colombia. There's going to be a lot of
dangerous stunts and a lot of hysterical comedy as Dwight and Mose try to pick
up women all across the globe.
AVC: Do you feel protective of Dwight? Do you wind up thinking things
like "Dwight wouldn't do that"?
RW: I am, but at the same time,
the writers protect the characters too, and write really interesting stuff for
him. There was only one time in the history of the show, out of 80-some
episodes, where I went, "Dwight wouldn't say that." It was a talking head discussing
massive multiplayer online gaming, and I was like, "It's just too on-the-nose,
it's just too easy." Everyone's making fun of massive multiplayer online gaming
and World Of Warcraft, and South Park had just done a World Of Warcraft episode, and I was like, "Can he do something more
interesting than that?" So we just wrote a different talking head, and it all
works out the same.
AVC: With The Office, it
seems like there's sometimes a tension between having low-key realism in tune
with the British series, or going a little broader.
RW: We have to find a balance
between doing all the comic stuff you want to do, and—it's not a
documentary. It's in a documentary style, but you can't have every episode…
Even in the English show, people are like, "It's so much more realistic." Wait
a minute, Gareth picks up a woman in a bar and drives home in a sidecar with a
scarf around his neck, while Finchy is banging a woman on her knees in the headlights
in a parking lot? There's an absurdity to it that's grounded, so you're allowed
to go with that level of absurdity and kind of keep it real. We've always been
about finding the absurdity of those human interactions while grounding it in a
real office workplace, but we do some really ludicrous stuff on our show. We
throw watermelons off the roof and put on fake mustaches and crash forklifts
and throw up on our cars and stuff like that.
AVC: Michael Scott is a little like Homer Simpson, in that the level
of his stupidity varies from episode to episode. Are you always on the watch
for going too broad?
RW: We are. We were very
concerned about that episode where we wore fake mustaches and went to the Utica
branch. We were very concerned: John, Steve, and I said to Greg and Joss
Whedon—who directed the episode—and the writer, Mindy Kaling, "We're
really concerned it feels like Three Stooges. It feels too broad, it feels not
right." And Joss Whedon is a terrific director, a great comedy director, and
he's like, "You know what? It's going to be fine. Let's just play it really
straight. These guys are going on this adventure, it's this misguided mission."
And it turned into a really nice episode, and actually a really believable one,
even though we were doing all this absurd stuff. We just committed and played
it as straight as possible, so a lot of it is the directing and editing choices
that ground the humor.
AVC: When did you realize that The Office was taking off?
RW: There were so many things
that happened all at the same time. During our second year, we were on the
verge of cancellation, and then all of a sudden, that wasn't really being
talked about. Our numbers were still pretty low, but NBC put up a giant billboard
of The Office in Burbank across from their main headquarters, and
I was like, "Oh my God, they can't cancel the show, they have to have spent 20 grand
hanging that enormous billboard. Are they going to hang that banner and pull
that plug?" Right at the same time, we started doing some killer episodes. There
was the Halloween episode, and then we did what I still think is one of our
greatest of all time—we did "The Injury" right around then where Dwight
throws up on the car and Michael burns his foot on the George Foreman grill. We
did the Christmas episode where I dress up like the elf. Michael Schur wrote
that one, and it was really well-directed.
It was right when video iPods were coming out, and the first video iPods
were loaded with that episode. All of a sudden, kids were watching it—I
was going around and kids were showing me their video iPods, and I was on them.
When I saw 13-year-old boys showing me my image on their video iPods as they
were passing me in the mall… I don't spend that much time at the mall, by
the way. But that's when I knew we were arriving. It was like, "Oh my goodness,
this is going to take off." In the early days—I don't read them anymore,
but we would read a lot of Office fan
sites, and the level of involvement in the Jim/Pam relationship started to get
so heated, people got so invested in Jim and Pam, and it just hooked them into
the show. Especially chick viewers. They love the Jim and Pam. Dwight is more
like the teenage-boy viewers. But when all those things were happening at the
same time, I knew we were going to be around for a while.
AVC: The 40-Year-Old
Virgin had to bode well for the
show. The show's lead became a big movie star overnight.
RW: Yeah, although remember, he
did The 40-Year-Old Virgin that summer, and we came back with our
second season in the fall and had really low numbers. So having a movie star on
a TV show does not guarantee audience.
AVC: What do you get out of writing that you don't necessarily get out
of performing?
RW: You have total control of it,
and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and
directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it,
you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little
characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at
first—though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll
have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.
AVC: Do you see it as an extension of acting?
RW: No, I don't see it as that. I
always wanted to write, I just never got my shit together. I wish I'd done it
when I was younger. I said to my wife the other day, "One of the few regrets I
have in my acting career is that I didn't start writing sooner," because I
really enjoy it. It's really, really hard and it sucks, but I enjoyed it at the
same time.
AVC: You were talking at the Q&A; yesterday about the different
endings of The Rocker. The film
is kind of about a guy coming of age 20 years too late. It seems like the
ending you talked about, where he becomes a manager and gives up on playing
with teenagers, is a little more in tune with a coming-of-age story.
RW: Yeah, the great thing about The
Rocker is, it's a coming-of-age story for a 40-year-old character. The
kids don't come of age, they get their shit together and grow up a little bit
along the way, but the guy who needs to come of age is the guy who's 40. I
think that's one of the cool things about the movie. That's kind of the heart
and soul of the movie.
AVC: Very quickly, your character goes from being this mildly
debauched figure to being very paternalistic, which is also more in line with
your original ending.
RW: I don't know how much to say,
I don't want to give it away, but there's a very uplifting, upbeat ending
currently in the movie, and there was an alternative ending that was more of a
tag, where you cut ahead a few months and you see where Fish is with the band,
and he's become their manager and is more involved in his romance with Curtis'
mom, and the studio people just felt like we didn't need to see that—you
could just imagine that happening, and you didn't need it. It slowed down the
emotional uplift of the ending, and they wanted to take it out on a strong
musical upswing, and I think they have a really good point. But I was hoping to
see that ending over the credit roll.
AVC: There's a bit of wish-fulfillment, eternal-adolescence element to
the ending as it is.
RW: I think there is a bit of wish-fulfillment
in this movie. Fame is the thing people want now more than anything else. People
would take fame over money, over anything, and getting to finally live your
dream, even if it's 20 years after when you thought it would happen, really
tugs at people's heartstrings, and takes them on this journey.
AVC: It also seems central to the whole mythology of rock music, in
that there's a fountain-of-youth quality to it.
RW: Yeah, Charlie Watts needs to
be hauled off the stage and put in buckets of ice and carried away in an
ambulance with an IV to his hotel after he performs with the Stones.
AVC: Does touring behind this movie give you any sense of what it's
like touring with a band?
RW: I have a little bit of my
rock 'n' roll fantasy going. [Affects rocker singing voice.] "It's all part of
my rock 'n' roll fantasy…" We got to play arenas with literally thousands of
people, and we got to actually drum in front of them, so I got a little bit of
a taste—there's something very primal and powerful about rocking people's
worlds and playing some kick-ass music.
AVC: Do you think Dwight's breakup with Angela humanized the
character, that it made him seem more vulnerable?
RW: Yeah. What I appreciate about
the writers is that they always find different facets of Dwight. A lesser team
of writers and a lesser show runner would make Dwight the same annoying guy
doing the same annoying things week after week, but they write in power
struggles and heartbreak and being rivals and challenges and all kinds of great
things for me to play as an actor, so I really appreciate that.
AVC: That's one advantage of having a hundred episodes to explore a
character, instead of 13.
RW: Unlike Seinfeld,
where we basically saw Kramer every week getting into the same kind of—just
a different style of a ridiculous predicament, whether it was painting lines on
the highway or having a cockfight or whatever. He was always up to some crazy
scheme, but they never revealed anything about Kramer, his family, his life,
his hopes, his dreams. The great thing about The Office and it being single-camera and the documentary style
is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the
existential angst that exists in the American workplace. Did you know they call
our show in England, The Office:
An American Workplace?
AVC: There are incarnations of The Office in a bunch of different countries. It's both
specific and universal.
RW: I've been running into
Brazilian Office fans. Apparently The Office plays in Brazil. Who would've thought that Brazilians
would identify with a bunch of pasty white Scrantonians in a paper company? But
the Brazilians I've met have really loved the show.