Rainn Wilson on faith and being funny as ‘The Bassoon King’
There was no way Rainn Wilson, 49, was going to write a memoir without Dwight Schrute, the obnoxious character Wilson played for eight years on the hit NBC comedy The Office, being involved. And while Schrute’s foreword trashes Wilson’s The Bassoon King:
Q: I’m going to pose the same question Dwight did: “Why is this privileged Hollywood windbag writing a memoir when he’s in his 40s?”
A: I co-wrote another book about five years ago called
SoulPancake and I wrote the introduction to it and, in doing so, I realized there’s an actual story to be told here. Yes, I have all the funny bits about weird animals in Nicaragua coming out of different orifices, and growing up nerdy and struggling as an actor and being poor. But this kind of spiritual through-line that runs through the book, I thought, was different, and it’s a story I really wanted to tell.
Q: Did you ever think Dwight would become as popular as he did?
A: I didn’t. I had no idea that there would be a cult following around Dwight and that he would take off so much. I always thought the more specific you make a character, the more relatable the character is, and it’s just kind of how acting works. Even if you’re playing just a horrible person, if you really put your heart into it and really make the character specific, make the audience see his hopes and dreams, they’ll get behind you, you know?
Q: It’s almost as if we recognize something in those characters.
A: The more humanity you bring, the more the audience will respond because — you’re right — there’s a little bit of Dwight in all of us.
Q: How are you learning to reconcile these goofball characters with your deeply spiritual side?
A: More and more as I go on, I see it less being at odds. If I can help tell stories and entertain or make people laugh, then I think that’s a great service. People love stories. They need them. They have hard lives, and it’s a great way to escape.
Q: You mention a hard point in your own life where you were dealing with alcohol dependency and investigating your faith for the first time.
A: That was the original impetus for SoulPancake (a website/ media company turned book). It was to chew on life’s big questions because that’s what I found myself doing. I was unhappy. I was using too many drugs and (too much) alcohol. You know, I was working as an actor, which had been my dream, but at the same time, I was feeling lost, and that’s when I started really investigating faith and spirituality and read a lot of the holy books of the world and eventually came back to the Bahá’i faith I had grown up in.
Q: And the Bahá’i faith centers on service as a form of worship. How do you and your wife, Holiday Reinhorn, practice that?
A: One of the things that we love doing together is we run a non-profit educational initiative in Haiti (Lide). It’s simply to educate girls and bring them literacy and help bring them leadership skills and self-esteem and help give them scholarships.
Q: In The Bassoon King, you speak honestly about getting cut out of films and bombing at the box office. Was it hard for you to believe in yourself then?
A: I realized looking back on my life that my greatest failures were actually my greatest successes. And from crises, we emerge with victories. It’s so painful, but I think oftentimes you look back and things that have been hard struggles for us have also provided the most growth for us as people.
Q: Do you have other projects in the works since Fox canceled Backstrom?
A: I just did a movie called The Shimmer Lake — it should come out sometime next year — and I’m going to do a play at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles this winter and then gonna try to promote the hell out of my book and get some people to read it, hopefully.