Rainn Wilson thought playing Dwight Schrute would launch his film career.
The “Office” alum revealed on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast that he spent “several years” being “miserable” about his career trajectory while on NBC’s hit sitcom series.
“When I was in ‘The Office,’ I had several years mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson said. “I’m realizing now, like, being on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, doing a lot of money, working with Steve Carell and Jenna Fisher and John Krasinski and these amazing amazing writers and directors like Paul Feig. I’m on one of the great TV shows. People love it. I wasn’t enjoying it.
She continued, “I was thinking, ‘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 film career? Why don’t I have this development deal?’”
“The Office” ran from 2005 to 2013 for nine seasons and later made streaming recordings on Netflix. Wilson’s film career would later include ‘The Boy’, ‘The Meg’ and last year’s ‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’.
Wilson added: “When I was in ‘The Office’,‘ I was holding on and holding on to, OK, 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.”
Wilson’s co-star and series writer Mindy Kaling previously said that “The Office” couldn’t be made today. “That show is so inappropriate now,” Kaling said on “Good morning Americain December 2022. “The writers that I’m still in touch with now, we always talk about how much of that show we probably couldn’t do now. Tastes have changed and honestly what offends people has changed so much now.
