Rainn Wilson Admits He Was ‘Mostly Unhappy’ for Several Years on The Office: ‘Why Am I Not a Movie Star?’
During The Office‘s original run on NBC, Rainn Wilson was starring on one of the most popular and acclaimed shows on TV — but it didn’t make him happy, he now admits.
“When I was in The Office, I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson, who played Dwight on the NBC comedy, tells Bill Maher on a recent episode of Maher’s Club Random podcast. “I’m on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, making lots of money… People love it. And 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?'”
Wilson adds that while he was on The Office, “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.” He played assistant to the regional manager Dwight Schrute on the NBC comedy for all nine seasons, earning three Emmy nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy series along the way.
His attempts to start a movie career during that era, however, like 2008’s The Rocker and 2010’s Super, struggled at the box office. Following The Office‘s end in 2013, Wilson starred in the short-lived Fox procedural Backstrom along with appearances on Mom and Star Trek: Discovery.
