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August 2008 

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Interview: Rainn Wilson
Heavy Rainn

Best known for playing tightly wound characters on The Office and Six Feet Under, Rainn Wilson lets loose as The Rocker’s heavy metal drummer in a teen rock band


By Ingrid Randoja

Rainn Wilson  doesn’t tangle with paparazzi, you don’t see him closing down trendy L.A. clubs, nor does he have a sex tape posted online.

 

The 42-year-old actor is married to fiction writer Holiday Reinhorn, is the father of a young son (Walter) and a devoted follower of the Baha’i Faith. If he were a menu item, he’d be rice pudding.

 

But lurking deep in the heart of Mr. Blancmange is a kick-out-the-jams, rock ’n’ roll star. Wilson allows his wild side to surface in the new comedy The Rocker, in which he plays Robert “Fish” Fishman, an aging drummer who gets the chance to revive his rock career when his teenage nephew Matt (Josh Gad) asks him to join his band, A.D.D. The band, which also includes brooding lead singer Curtis (Teddy Geiger) and dour bassist Amelia (Superbad’s Emma Stone), isn’t going anywhere, that is until a video of Fish rehearsing in the nude hits YouTube, and suddenly the band becomes a hot commodity.


Rainn Wilson in The Rocker

 Fish may be the most extroverted character the actor has ever played, but he’s also emotionally stunted, and that’s the prototypical Wilson character: the child/man whose self-involved antics make us both laugh and cringe.

We first got a glimpse of Wilson’s immense talent when he appeared as the wonderfully creepy undertaker Arthur in TV’s Six Feet Under, which in turn led to him being cast as the supremely nerdy suck-up Dwight Schrute in the U.S. version of The Office. He’s popped up on the big screen as Luke Wilson’s misogynistic pal in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and as a sympathetic science teacher in The Last Mimzy.

 

You can credit the 10 years Wilson spent working onstage in New York for honing his acting skills. The Seattle, Washington, native attended both Tufts University (located near Boston) and the University of Washington before moving to New York to enroll in NYU’s graduate acting program. After graduation he waited tables, worked in offices and operated his own moving company in order to supplement his theatre career.

 

Decked out in an AC/DC T-shirt and Buddy Holly glasses, Wilson was in Toronto (where The Rocker was filmed) to chat about learning to play drums for the movie, the lure of celebrity and getting naked in front of the camera.


I can’t believe you hadn’t played drums before being cast in The Rocker. You’ve got chops.
“Thanks. It’s one of the first things that I said when I read the script, the drumming has gotta look real and it’s gotta feel real. After I got cast I took a couple of weeks of drum lessons in my garage, thundering away and pissing off my neighbours in Los Angeles. At first I thought about drums as any other musical instrument, but they’re not. There’s a certain mentality to someone who likes to sit at the back and pound as loud as possible on something. There’s literally a ‘drummer’s mentality.’ No matter how cerebral a drummer you’ll meet, they all love to rock, and there’s that unabashed, open-heartedness and physicality I really learned a lot about.”


Do you have a musical background?
“I took piano lessons as a child and played music in bands all through high school. I was in the orchestra, I played bassoon for years, and was a band geek in the marching band. Now I play guitar. I could read music, which helped me a lot.”


But you don’t just play the drums, you play the drums naked. How did it feel to strip down for the camera?
“I was naked in front of the crew, which was a little weird, but we always knew that was the comic centrepiece of our movie. I had to keep it believable in that Fish thinks the camera is the microphone, and that he happens to be naked in this hot basement of this Chinese food restaurant. Many of my fond memories of making this movie are of being spritzed with sweat at five in the morning. Glycerin, water and Vaseline, whatever it would take to make me look as sweaty as humanly possible, and I remember it running down my ass crack. Good times [laughs].”


Did you relate to Fish in that, like you, here’s a guy who becomes a celebrity later in life?
“I won’t say that I can relate to Fish in that sense, because all I wanted to do was be a working actor. All I wanted to do is get paid and not have to wait tables anymore or drive a moving van anymore in order to make rent. And I just kept going, and I just kept getting more and better and bigger parts, and doors just kept opening for me. And then I got lucky enough to get on Six Feet Under and The Office and then I became a celebrity. But things could have certainly gone in another direction.”


Have you ever thought about what would have happened if a producer had plucked you from a play while you were in your early 20s and cast you in some TV sitcom?
“You don’t really know who you are when you are in your early 20s. You don’t start finding yourself until your late 20s or your 30s. Celebrity will f--k with your brain no matter when it happens. If you get famous at 60, it will f--k with your head ’cause it’s crazy. My heart goes out to those poor girls who are famous at 17, and sex symbols too. I’m a celebrity, but not a sex symbol — well only to some very weird few. But to be a sex symbol and a celebrity that young, that can just...whoa.”


Hollywood just loves to sexualize young girls.
“There’s no way you’ve had a healthy sex life yet, so to be put in push-up bras, on billboards...it’s a crazy, crazy ride.”

 

You didn’t have to worry about push-up bras playing Fish, but rather squeezing into tight leather pants.
“When I tried on the wig, put on the crazy shirts, the ‘guy liner’ [Wilson’s term for mascara] and leather pants...you can learn so much by being physically informed by the character. People always ask me that about Dwight from The Office, and when you wear those Dwight glasses, part your hair in the middle and you’ve got a calculator wristwatch on and you’re wearing a polyester/wool-blend suit, you can’t help but sit a certain way or look at the world a certain way. It affects you. Anyone can do it, you don’t even have to be an actor.”  


Ingrid Randoja is the deputy editor of Famous.


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