![]() He’s also written a memoir, The Bassoon King launched a fictional podcast and last year made a YouTube docuseries called An Idiot’s Guide to Climate Change. As an actor, he’s starred in the indie darling Juno (2007), as the store clerk who told the teen protagonist that her “eggo is preggo” in the superhero spoof Super (2010) and in the underrated drama Blackbird (2019), as the husband of Kate Winslet. Wilson’s divine expression has taken many forms. If I’d had a normal childhood, I don’t think I would have gotten to be an actor – I don’t think that I would have got to bring to life strange, offbeat characters like Dwight Schrute and Mr Hamby.” “There’s something about that unsettling alienation that allowed me to access these kinds of characters. That adds a whole other level of alienation from me and the world of Seventies and Eighties Seattle.” And as if it wasn’t weird enough that I had strange parents and low self-esteem, as if I wasn’t a member of the pottery club and didn’t play the bassoon, my parents were members of this obscure, strange-sounding religion – the Baha’i faith. “My parents were pretty bizarre and we were poor and living in the pacific northwest. “I was an offbeat young lad,” says Wilson. From the ages of three to five, Wilson lived with his dad and stepmum in Nicaragua, before moving back to Seattle, where he was shoved and punched by his classmates to chants of “Rainn, Rainn, go away”. Wilson’s mother was an actor and yoga teacher (in fact, she still teaches it at 80) his father, who died last year, was a painter and writer who released a science-fiction novel called Tentacles of Dawn. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the people who named their son Rainn were unconventional. ![]() It’s Shakespeare, it’s the bible, it’s Greek myth. In the midst of all this chaos, there’s this tale as ancient as the bible of fathers and sons. ![]() He’s missing a son and the boy is missing a father. “Beyond the twists and turns, the element that I thought was so touching was the father-son story that emerges between Hamby and Jack’s character,” says Wilson. Thanks to Wilson’s ability to seem at once goofy and sinister, it all just about holds together. What seems at first to be a straightforward morality tale soon becomes something much slipperier. Joey wants to help him Matt thinks he’s seen too much. When they rob a house that’s being fumigated, a security guard called Mr Hamby, played by Wilson, takes chase – then swiftly falls down a large hole. Grazer plays Joey, a sweetly naive teenage boy Fionn Whitehead is his borderline sociopathic older brother Matt. It’s that film – “the cat and mouse thriller of a mysterious man trapped in a hole by feral boys” – that Wilson is here to promote. “If you’re gonna do the joke, make it a smart joke, I implore you.” “If I say I had a cheeseburger for lunch, it’s like, ‘You didn’t have beets?!’” he says, pulling the kind of disgusted face that Dwight would make if you didn’t own a nunchuck. What he can’t abide are the “lame Dwight jokes”. When people come over to say they love the show that made him spottable-with-his-entire-face-covered levels of famous, Wilson finds it “very beautiful”. ![]() Yes, he’s been in lots of other things – last year’s badly timed pandemic thriller Utopia, for example – but it’s Schrute to whom he seems inexorably tied. “Someone drove by and was like, ‘DWIGHT!!’” recalls the 55-year-old, shaking his head. The other day, the star of The US Office was in a car park wearing a hat, sunglasses, mask and a full beard. Rainn Wilson cannot escape Dwight Schrute.
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