Thursday, August 21, 2008
A&E How I asked Rainn Wilson the wrong question
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 9:35 PM
I was excited when I learned that I’d be able to interview Rainn Wilson during his PA tour for The Rocker in July. Wilson has become one of my favorite character actors, primarily due to his work on NBC’s “The Office” as Dwight Schrute: salesman, beet farmer, geek and would-be Alpha Male:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/msNbP5QW02U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
In person, Wilson proved to be cool as the proverbial cucumber (or perhaps “beet” would be a more appropriate analogy). While we spoke at 8:30 a.m. in a lounge at the W Hotel, the 2008 Emmy Award nominees literally were being announced in the next room, but Wilson showed perfect nonchalance. Afterwards we found out that he indeed received another Supporting Actor Nomination.
I did, however, see how Wilson reacts to a question he’s tired of hearing.
After chatting about drummers in general and The Rocker in particular for a while, I wanted to switch to my questions about “The Office.” With a preface about how his character as an Americanized version of the similar role, Gareth, on the original, British version of “The Office,” I asked “I was wondering how you approached Dwight differently from Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth."
Almost before I’d finished the sentence, Wilson said, “Do you really want to ask questions from five years ago?”
“Well, I’m sorry to focus on that -- ”
“Quite all right…”
“-- But I like Dwight so much -- ”
“That happened in 2004, which I guess is four years ago.”
“... and Dwight’s just so much more aggressive that Gareth. And it put me off at first, and then I appreciated how brilliant it was.”
“Okay, well, that’s nice to say,” said Wilson, seeming satisfied. “I didn’t really formulate him as aggressive, I just think that Americans are a lot more direct than English people. You create a character partially in terms of the needs of the show. And it’s how he’s written, you know. It’s not like Dwight is written as a more passive, fainting flower. They needed a real obstacle for the other people in the office right off the bat, and Dwight had to be that obstacle. It had to be Dwight vs. the Office on health care -- that’s the third episode we did. He had to be the nemesis, in a different way than Gareth was.”
In retrospect, I appreciate that Wilson gave an honest response to a question he'd heard a million times. At the time, I was put a little on the defensive. Will he hate my other questions about “The Office?” But I can’t ask him about the new season, because he’ll be sworn to spoiler-free secrecy about that.
Nevertheless, the rest of the interview went fairly well. We spoke some more about geek culture, The Rocker and the status of Wilson’s original screenplay about an ex-ninja, Bonzai Shadowhands, and I decided to ask a little more about ‘Office’ history. Treading carefully, I said, “I have a question about an earlier “Office” episode, from a couple of years ago.”
“Quite all right.”
I mentioned the episode “Dwight’s Speech,” in which Wilson’s character must give a speech before a large group of salespeople, despite a paralyzing fear of public speaking. Dwight’s prankish nemesis Jim offers him “some notes” for a speech that turn out to be fascist texts he downloaded from the internet. Dwight’s eventual speech is one of the actor’s finest moments and a piece of acting so raw in its way, it’s like the sitcom equivalent of punk rock. It's not on Youtube any more (or among the 200 "Office" clips on Hulu), but you can see the text and hear his audio here.
Wilson said, “The way I thought of it was that Dwight is so terrified of this, he’s really nervous in front of large groups of people, he’s ready to absolutely tank. The speech that Dwight probably wrote up for himself was probably the worst speech possible. What Jim did was give him the perfect vehicle to express himself, the phrases of Mao and Mussolini, and all of sudden it just clicked, and all of that tension and nervousness poured through that alleyway of fascism, it was like Mt. Vesuvius erupting.”
I suggested to Wilson that Dwight holds up a less than flattering mirror to geeks, and that part of me goes “Ouch” whenever he makes a reference to “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica."
“You need to be proud of your geek status! You need to be like, ‘Yes! I love ‘Battlestar Galactica!’” Wilson enthused.
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