It took the writers well into the second season to flesh out the Dunder Mifflin universe and give each character their own distinct personality, but they had the peculiarities of Dwight figured out from the very beginning. He is loosely based on Gareth Keenan from the UK Office, and both characters do have an obsession with authority, a bitter rivalry with a charismatic paper salesman who sits one desk away, and a surprising ability to attract beautiful women despite being a nerd without any self-awareness or discernible sense of humor. But the Office writers took Dwight in a totally different direction by making him a beet farmer with an almost Amish existence who still somehow finds time to obsess over Battlestar Galactica, Harry Potter, and heavy metal music. It’s a wild mass of contradictions that made him the most eclectic character on the show, and it’s hard to imagine anyone but Rainn Wilson playing the part.
Rainn Wilson: Someone described Dwight as being a fascist nerd, and I think that really sums him up pretty well. He’s into hierarchy, power, and structures.
Rob Sheffield: Dwight was always so much more dimensional than Gareth. I love Gareth, but Dwight was such a disturbing character since he yearned for authority of his own and felt so trapped. I remember about ten years ago [Rainn] came into the Rolling Stone offices for a staff lunch and he had this really funny, breathtakingly candid thing to say about how easy it was to create that part. He said, “People going out for roles in sitcoms are comedians, they’re not actors, so they don’t know how to create a character. This was no problem at all for me. I knew I was going to be able to do this.”
Rainn Wilson: It was very important to me that I have the least-flattering haircut possible to my head—which I designed specifically. . . . And also the fact that he still wears a beeper, which is about eight years after beepers have been completely discontinued, because he probably has some number that someone might still have. But all of these things put together, and then it kind of comes into your body. And I think your job as the actor is to let these impulses flow through you and not stifle them. He has this love of hierarchies and this love of power. Well, he’s going to assert his power with his pelvis and maybe stand inappropriately close to someone. And it’s kind of like an alpha-male type of thing.
Creed Bratton: Rainn Wilson is an absolute genius, one of the naturally funny people on the planet. His instincts are impeccable and he never censored himself.
Caroline Williams (Writer, Season 3): I feel like it’s got to be based on someone Greg knew because Dwight came in very fully formed, though obviously Rainn brought a lot to the character. There was so much that was northeastern Pennsylvania in him with the obsession with muscle cars combined with farming and the obvious sort of Amish suggestion.
Danny Chun (Writer, Seasons 6–8): Dwight in a lot of ways is like an archetype of sort of [the] surly nerd or the annoying coworker. But then early in season-two stuff they added all these odd extra dimensions, which just gave him so much specificity, and that gave us so much to work with.
Rainn Wilson: He’s a beet farmer and that makes total sense, ’cause you ever meet a farmer, they can’t quite ever fit in, in society. They may try as hard as they want. They can play it cool, they can do whatever they want; they can’t really fit into city life no matter how much they try. They’re just more in tune with the dirt and the tides and the seasons and the wolves than, you know, human interaction.
Justin Spitzer (Writer, Seasons 3–9): It’s interesting because he had these two very distinct parts of his character that kind of don’t make sense together. I always preferred the part of him that was into hot-rod cars and playing heavy metal and rocking out as opposed to the fascist stuff. Then there’s a part of him that’s this weird quasi-Amish beet farmer. Again, they don’t make sense together but sometimes that’s what gives people dimension, these contrasting characteristics.
Nathan Rabin: Most times if you’re playing a nerd you play it as somebody who’s embarrassed by themselves. Somebody who knows that they’re geeky, who knows that they’re not attractive, who knows that it’s awkward for people to spend time with him. With Rainn Wilson, I think what he did that was absolutely brilliant is he played it as a position of delusional strength. Also, he kind of had what Michael Scott had, which is this combination of being very arrogant but also being very unself-aware and being very unself-critical. He fucking went for it and he had a sex life and he had a girlfriend.
Jeff Blitz: Rainn somehow understood from the beginning that this is a character that doesn’t exactly exist in the real world that some of the other people on the show exist [in], but he just had an amazing intuitive sense for how far he could take it. He also found a way to play it so that the emotional heart of it was true and the factual stuff didn’t need to be true.
Larry Wilmore: Dwight loves rules. He can’t get enough of rules. He’s very dramatic in that way, even at his own expense. That’s my favorite thing about him. He’s arrogant in a way that just never works, which is really funny too. I have no idea how the character was even created. It just kind of happened organically. I feel like that is all Greg Daniels though. It all just happened to come out of his brain and we just happened to get on that train.
Owen Ellickson (Writer, Seasons 8 and 9): Mackenzie Crook did not do it the way Rainn did it, but I think the brilliance of Rainn was that Dwight and Gareth are fundamentally weak characters, but Rainn always played Dwight to absolute maximum strength, which then made his being stymied by the realities of the stories he was in even funnier. He really thought he was omnipotent. It felt like you were watching Stalin or something, then he would get upended every twenty seconds. There was just something brilliant about that.
Rainn Wilson: I think the greatest comedy comes from people taking themselves seriously. The circumstances can be absolutely absurd, but if the person is taking the stakes really seriously and taking themselves really seriously, it really is a great comedy mine to dig from.
Jason Kessler: There’s a major difference between acting like you’re weird and being weird. I think Rainn’s weird in a great way and he was able to bring a specificity to that role that you can’t fake. He’s a very thoughtful actor and really cared about the dynamics of Dwight in a way that some actors maybe wouldn’t have. One of Dwight’s major characteristics is loyalty. That could be very cartoonish, and that could be very real, and I think the sense of reality that Rainn brought to the role is making that loyalty feel like he wanted it in the same way that Michael wants to be friends with everyone. I think Dwight just wants a friend, and he wants that friend to have power over him and to tell him what to do and be proud of him when he does those things. He found that in Michael.
Randall Einhorn: Michael needed Dwight because Dwight was the only person who took him seriously. They needed each other and were codependent in a really wonderful way.
Owen Ellickson: There was real magic in the Michael/Dwight pairing. Michael was so unsure about everything he believed that that just really put Dwight in such stark relief as a guy who was in complete control of his own bad life.
B. J. Novak: There are so many beliefs in Dwight’s head it’s a wonder he can ever think about anything else. There’s religion, there’s tradition, there’s every science fiction thing he’s ever seen, probably everything he’s read, every old wives’ tale—every belief is somewhere on a ridge in Dwight Schrute’s brain.
Owen Ellickson: Rainn made him so remarkably self-assured that you believed every new corner of Dwight’s personality just because Dwight so palpably believed them.
Halsted Sullivan (Writer, Seasons 5–9): Greg always described Dwight as the law-and-order character and that’s pretty much how I saw him. He was someone who knew if he followed the rules, things would work out. But then that’s why Jim had such a fun time pranking him, because Dwight was a predictable character. He knew that Dwight would act and react in a certain way ’cause he was a rule follower. And he definitely was the self-imposed office cop and the self-imposed disciplinarian, often to his own detriment, because he became so predictable.
Danny Chun: A lot of the character is in Rainn. I love Rainn. He’s a wonderful human and very sort of soulful, but he’s also kind of intimidating. He kind of cultivates a little bit of a grumpy persona, but deep down he’s just a wonderful, sweet guy. And he’s also just incredible, he can memorize a huge talking head in like a minute and spit it back to you. He was so adept and it was a real treat to write for him because he was funny, he brought stuff to it but he was also very appreciative and gracious toward the writers. I always felt like it was a joy to work with him.
Mark Proksch (Nate Nickerson, Seasons 7–9): Rainn’s an interesting guy and he’s eccentric in the best ways possible. He came into the show with a definite point of view of what this character should be. And you’ll either get cast as that or they’ll pass on you as that, but it’s not like he was going to change that character dramatically to fit what they wanted. That’s a big thing if you’re casting a show. If a person comes in that can do something really well and it’s not quite what you had in mind, you should take them, because they’re going to make the character their own, and it’ll become a stronger character instead of just a watered-down goofy guy. I think Rainn did that and that’s why that character was always so strong and never faltering at all . . . because Rainn honed in on what he wanted for that character to be and then never really relented. People may think it’s a cartoony character, but it worked in that show so well.
Caroline Williams: Dwight embodies a kind of masculine insecurity that compensates with a sort of ridiculousness and doesn’t realize how that’s not actually swagger, it’s just tragic. He always struck me as sort of the most insecure because of his need to overcompensate. And I think someone who is insecure innately seeks a leader to bring them purpose. There [were] always jokes about how Dwight would’ve been like the perfect henchman for a truly evil despot because it’s not about ideology. It’s his own psychology. That came up a lot. I remember a lot of the writing staff was Jewish, and they found a lot of humor in these sort of ideas. And I was always like, “Oh, God. That is horrible. How dare we talk about this?” Terrible things, but it was very funny.
Gene Stupnitsky: I remember early on trying to write a Dwight talking head where he was talking about his grandfather fighting in World War II and you realize at the end he was a Nazi. I remember Michael [Schur] fighting me on that. He was like, “He can’t be that! He can’t be that!” I was like, “No, we can make this work! He has a Nazi heritage.” We were very unsure of it, but we did it and it just became part of his canon. That’s who he was and it was accepted. His grandfather was a Nazi.
Lee Eisenberg: You can’t go back on that.
Rainn Wilson: He would have made a good Nazi.
Rob Sheffield: My favorite Dwight episode ever is the one where he gives a speech [“Dwight’s Speech”] and Jim doesn’t tell him it’s a speech he took from Mussolini, and Dwight delivering that speech is so intense. And honestly, it tells you more than you want to know about Mussolini as well and where Mussolini’s psychology must have come from. But Dwight loves that incredibly stupid and disturbing fascist speech and he is so happy in that moment; it might be the happiest he ever is in all the years that we spend with him. It’s always a disturbing episode for me.
Gene Stupnitsky: There are many sides to Dwight. He would have been a great Nazi, but there’s also Dwight the ladies’ man, which is so unexpected.
Lee Eisenberg: What’s unexpected about Dwight sometimes comes from Rainn. Rainn is musical. He plays guitar, so Dwight plays guitar even though you don’t especially think Dwight would like music.
Gene Stupnitsky: The character is round. It would be easy to have every Dwight line be like, “I am a disciplinarian. I am humorless.” But Dwight has a sense of humor. It’s just different from our sense of humor. Dwight probably watches YouTube clips of people getting punched in the nuts and he thinks it’s great. Everyone has an interior life on the show and I think that’s what’s great. No one is just their one joke.