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While I haven’t yet watched The Office, I enjoy Rainn Wilson’s quirky, Dennis-the-Menace vibe, and he’s in one of my all-time favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, as one of the aliens. I’m really intrigued by his latest Peacock series Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss. It’s based on a book of the same name (minus the Rainn Wilson intro, of course) and follows him around the world trying out local practices of happiness. So as part of promoting the show, Rainn sat down with Bill Maher on Maher’s Club Random podcast and discussed his personal journey with satisfaction over the years:
‘Why am I not the next Jack Black?’: “When I was in ‘The Office,’ I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson admitted. “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 Fischer 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. I wasn’t enjoying it. 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 a development deal?’”
It’s never enough: “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. It was never enough. Humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and ‘never enough’ has helped us as a species.”
The Office–Pandemic edition: “It would’ve been so much fun to film ‘The Office’ during the pandemic,” Wilson said. “If we had pandemic episodes, that would’ve been amazing. ‘The Office’ writers were so great–they would’ve been able to spin that in some beautiful ways.”
He has an episode pitch ready: “I think it would be: [Dwight] gets the call from corporate to get everyone back in the office and everyone is resistant,” Wilson said. “So, one at a time, Dwight has to kidnap every ‘Office’ cast member and bring them into Dunder Mifflin in some kind of obscure and somewhat inappropriate way.”
If you take Wilson’s comments just from the excerpts in this article, he sounds whiny and petulant. But when you put it in the context of the show he’s promoting and, as a result, the searching, contemplative side of himself that he’s opening up in the process, then the comments make more sense. He’s clear now on the fact that his thinking back then was distorted, and he’s worked to figure out how his head got stuck in that place at that particular time. I have empathy with him for that. But of course, I’m the girl who took a summer course on existentialism in lieu of having a bat mitzvah at age 13, so I’m already a fan of breaking down these philosophical thoughts. And I’m just plain nerdy. Aside from that, all I have to say is I hope some producers were listening cause he offered up a great Office reunion/reboot scenario.
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