Rainn Wilson has admitted that despite his success on The Office, he spent several years “mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough”.
Across nine seasons, the now-57-year-old actor starred as Dunder Mifflin salesman Dwight Schrute on the US iteration of the popular workplace mockumentary, which aired from 2005 to 2013.
During that time, Wilson went on to land three consecutive Emmy nominations for his role in the five-time award-winning sitcom.
However, on the latest episode of Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, The Office star revealed that instead of appreciating his “TV star” status at the time, he was lamenting his failed movie career.
“When I was in The Office, I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson confessed. “I’m realising now, like, I’m on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, making lots of money, working with Steve Carell and Jenna Fisher 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 this development deal?’”
He continued: “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.
John Krasinski and Rainn Wilson in ‘The Office’ US— (YouTube/The Office)
“It was never enough,” he added, noting that “humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years and ‘never enough’ has helped us as a species”.
Although Wilson lacked gratitude for The Office at the time, during an April appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, he said he would have loved to have got the cast back together for an episode about the workers of Dunder Mifflin returning to the office after the pandemic.
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“If we had pandemic episodes, that would’ve been amazing,” he said. “The Office writers were so great – they would’ve been able to spin that in some beautiful ways.”
He also told Barrymore that the show’s universal success always surprised him, given that the show was nearly cancelled many times, then became a “big hit” only to “dwindle” in the later seasons.
The Office remains one of the most popular shows on streaming services 10 years after it ended.
