Rainn Wilson Was ‘Unhappy’ for Years During ‘The Office’: ‘I Wanted to Be a Movie Star’

Rainn Wilson thought playing Dwight Schrute would launch his film career.

The “Office” alum revealed during Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast that he spent “several years” being “unhappy” over his career trajectory while on the hit NBC sitcom series.

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“When I was in ‘The Office,’ I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough,” Wilson said. “I’m realizing 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.”

He continued, “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?'”

“The Office” aired from 2005 to 2013 across nine seasons and later made streaming records 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 on ‘The Office,‘ I was clutching and grasping at, 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 America” in December 2022. “The writers who I’m still in touch with now, we always talk about how so much of that show we probably couldn’t make now. Tastes have changed, and honestly what offends people has changed so much now.”

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