We knew Dwight Schrute certainly wasn’t satisfied just being the assistant to the regional manager, but as it turns out, Rainn Wilson wasn’t always so content playing the role, either. On a new episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, the actor explained why he felt like The Office “wasn’t enough” for him as a “mostly unhappy” rising actor.
“When I was in The Office, I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson said. “I’m realizing now, like, I’m on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, making lots of money, working with Steve Carell and Jenna Fisher and John Krasinski and these amazing writers and incredible directors like Paul Feig. I’m on one of the great TV shows. People love it, and I wasn’t enjoying it.”
It’s not that Wilson wanted to outshine his co-stars, but being in a long-running sitcom started to feel a bit limiting. He added: “I was thinking about, ‘Why am I not a movie star? Why am I not the next Jack Black or the next Will Ferrell? How come I can’t have a movie career? Why don’t I have this development deal?’”
Wilson has had a few shots on the big screen as a leading man, like 2008’s The Rocker and 2010’s Super. But still, he was by far mostly known as Dwight, whose “all work and no play” attitude doesn’t quite apply to most Jack Black-type roles.
“When I was on The Office, I was clutching and grasping at, okay, I was making hundreds of thousands. I wanted millions, and I was a TV star, but I wanted to be a movie star,” he says now. “It was never enough. Humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and ‘never enough’ has helped us as a species.”
Of course, Wilson is ultimately thankful for his time in Scranton, Pennsylvania, especially when he hears from fans that The Office has helped them through hard times: “I wasn’t thinking about giving laughter as a therapeutic remedy,” he said. “But what an honor it was to be a part of something like that.”
Watch Wilson’s full episode on Club Random below. The quotes above begin around the 38-minute mark.
It’s been quite a while since The Office wrapped, so we never got to see how the Dunder Mifflin staff would handle a pandemic. Wilson recently hypothesized, however, that Dwight would “kidnap” everyone “in some kind of obscure and somewhat inappropriate way.”
