Rainn Wilson • Liverpool Comic Con

Written By:

Andrew Dex

With over 200 episodes of The Office (US) to his name, Rainn Wilson has dominated TV screens globally for over twenty years with his genius take on Dwight Schrute. With a balance of clever comedy and serious moments, the series can be watched on repeat, and it has established itself as one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Outside of this, Rainn has taken on many other brilliant roles, from one of his first major movie projects as Lahnk in Galaxy Quest through to The Leaping Lord in Hitpig! His acting portfolio is superb, and before his appearance at Liverpool Comic Con, STARBURST talks with Rainn to reflect on an incredible journey through TV and film…

STARBURST: Galaxy Quest was one of your first major movie projects. How did you get involved with it, and what was it like to work alongside such a huge cast, such as Sigourney Weaver, Tim Allen, and Alan Rickman? Incredible.

Rainn Wilson: I had spent ten years doing theatre in New York, and I moved to LA with this comedy troupe that I had called The New Bozena. We were doing this show we had created and run off Broadway, and we were bringing it to LA. So we were performing The New Bozena in Los Angeles, this sketch comedy, crazy, clown, post-modern show. It’s like Pee-wee Herman meets The Mighty Boosh, and I couldn’t get my agents to call me back. So they sent their assistant to go and see the show, which is always a death nail, when the assistant gets sent to go and see the show that you’re in. I was annoyed that they brought the assistant, but the assistant brought this friend, who was like 23 years old, this young woman, and she was like “Oh my god, the show was so funny, I’m going to bring you guys all in for this pilot!” So we all came in for this pilot that was happening at NBC, about naked and indestructible androids, and it’s one of the worst pieces of TV. You can still find some scenes from it on YouTube. It was called The Expendables, and long before, The Expendables franchise with Jason Statham was a dream in someone’s head. It was god awful, but after 5-6 auditions, I actually booked it. All of a sudden, because I booked a pilot, my agents were calling me back and took, of course, full responsibility for landing me the job, even though it happened to be this assistant’s friend, who brought us in.

Right after that, I booked a part in Almost Famous; I did Almost Famous and Galaxy Quest in the same month. Those were my first two movies, both DreamWorks films. All of a sudden, I was kind of on the map. My agents could say “Hey! This guy came in from New York, he has got a part in Almost Famous, he just booked a pilot for NBC.” So all of a sudden it perks up. So I was able to get an audition for Galaxy Quest. I was supposed to have a much larger role in it, as one of the main aliens, along with Jed Rees, Enrico Colantoni, and Missi Pyle. But, because I had booked this NBC pilot, they were afraid that the NBC pilot was going to need me to shoot, and if they picked up the show, then I couldn’t commit to too much. So, I was only in three of four scenes of Galaxy Quest. What an incredible experience, as essentially a first movie. There’s a scene that I was in that was cut, that you can see on YouTube. It was a deleted scene with myself and Tony Shalhoub, and in it I have a string of unintelligible, gobbledegook, and I kept going up on the line, I couldn’t remember the line, it was horrifying. Sigourney Weaver was there, Alan Rickman was there, Sam Rockwell, Tim Allen, and I couldn’t remember my line; it was humiliating to me. As a theatre actor, you pride yourself on remembering your lines. Everyone was very kind, but the scene was cut from the movie. I loved being a part of it, When you do a movie, you never know the longevity of it whilst you’re working on it. Like another movie that I did around the same time, was House of 1000 Corpses, it was dumped by Universal, it had a budget of four million dollars, and no one thought it would amount to anything, and it has a huge fan base, and lives on, some twenty years afterwards. It’s the same as Galaxy Quest, you never know when you’re going to be a part of those projects that will resonate with an audience. I’m so lucky that I got to have been a part of the Galaxy Quest universe.

So, jumping into The Office, how did the idea for Threat Level Midnight come about, and what was that whole special episode like to work on for yourself? As you’re playing a character, within a character!

That was one of the greatest episodes of The Office of all time. There was an earlier episode where Michael Scarn’s screenplay was mentioned, and then later on, they always had it in the back of their mind, like “That would be so much fun to actually shoot Michael’s screenplay.” Yeah, I got to be the robot butler, it’s a dream come true! It’s like, Dwight Schrute acting in any role would be delicious to play, but then getting to play a robot butler, which is a role I imagine he loved playing, that’s like his dream come true. It was great, and I’m very proud of that episode; it’s absolutely hysterical. The only drawback to that was that I never got to dance in the Scarn! I never got to do the Scarn!

Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute in The Office

You’ve returned to animation once more with Hitpig!, voicing The Leaping Lord! What can you tell us about this movie, and why should readers watch it?

Hitpig! is one of those projects that came along – again, getting to voice a villain role. I really love the artwork of Berkeley Breathed, and I’ve been a fan for decades. I wanted to be a part of his world. If you’re a Berkeley Breathed fan, or a fan of graphic novels, graphic comic books, and just want to see eye-popping art that you don’t normally see in animated films, it’s a real wild ride. That’s why you should go and see it.

Rainn Wilson as The Leaping Lord in Hitpig!

You worked on Monsters vs. Aliens in 2009; has the creative process for voice acting changed much since then?

Animated is the same thing. You meet with the directors, they show you the character drawings, they show you some scenes. Oftentimes in animated films, it’s not like a completed script. When you’re shooting a live-action film, it’s pretty much a locked script. Sometimes they’ll make some last-minute changes here and there, change some dialogue or whatever. It’s hard to describe, but with animated movies, it’s just a very different process. They’ll have a couple of scenes worked out, and some sequences. They’ll show you some animatics. Usually, one of the animators is doing a temp track of the voice, so they’ll play you that, and they try to give you a sense of the world. With Monsters vs. Aliens, I was going in for a year and a half, doing voices, and re-doing scenes, and then they’d be like, “We’ve scrapped all of this, we’re doing it differently.” Sometimes they’re like, “Yeah, we’re going to take it in a different direction. This is too dark, so we need to make it a little more kid-friendly here.” It’s a crazy process, but it hasn’t really changed that much, in terms of the voice acting.

Gallaxhar from Monsters vs. Aliens (Voiced by Rainn Wilson)

How excited are you for Liverpool Comic Con, a lot of your fellow cast members from The Office are there as well! Not failing to mention Nicholas Hoult, who will be Lex in Superman: Legacy! You can share notes!

I don’t think he needs any notes from me! He is such an astounding actor, I love his work so much. I’m a huge fan of the Manchester music scene, and I do know that Manchester is not Liverpool. I’m excited to see various regions of the UK. I’m excited to see the city of Liverpool, and meet the fans out there. It’s a very strange thing. When The Office started, there were so many UK Office fans, and they were mean. Like, “Our show is the best! Why are you even trying to do it?” There was this antagonism, and this aggression; they were trying to review bomb us. It took a long while, but then as our show percolated over there in the UK, there have been so many fans that we’ve brought over to the dark side, who have enjoyed watching the 201 episodes of The Office vs the 14 episodes of the UK Office, over and over again. Both can exist! Both get to exist in the world and be enjoyed, and both are brilliant in their own ways.

Absolutely! Also, huge congratulations on the 20th anniversary of The Office! That’s an incredible milestone.

It’s pretty amazing. I never thought when we were doing this weird little mockumentary with bad lighting, poorly dressed actors, and rough cubicles that we would be making something historic. We’re so grateful.

What other projects do you have coming up on the horizon, and can you share anything or tell us about them at this point?

I have a new movie coming out in September called Code 3. That’s with Lil Rel Howery, a great comedic actor, who has been in a ton of stuff. It’s about down-and-out ambulance drivers on a night from hell. It’s a serio-comic, crazy misadventure, and I think folks will really dig that. I don’t know where it airs in the UK, but in the US on Peacock, I did this travel show called Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss last year. It’s about mental health, and looking for happiness. I hope that UK fans of The Office will look for that in the UK, wherever it might exist.