“Cynicism is a disease that robs people of the gift of life.”
Rainn Wilson (FB/IG/TW: @RAINNWILSON, SOULPANCAKE.COM) is best known for playing Dwight Schrute on NBC’s Emmy-winning TV show The Office. He has also acted in Super, Cooties, Juno, Monsters vs. Aliens, and The Rocker, among other movies. He co-founded SoulPancake, a media company that seeks to tackle life’s big questions. He’s a board member of the Mona Foundation and co-founded Lidè Haiti, an educational initiative in rural Haiti that empowers young, at-risk women through the arts. He is the author of The Bassoon King.
Spirit animal: Sloth
For those of you who’d love to kick me in the face, Rainn saved you the trouble. Just search “Rainn Wilson kicking Tim Ferriss in the face.” Long story.
• What advice would you give your 30-year-old self?
“At 30, I was a starving New York theater actor, just going around trying to get acting work, and barely making $17 grand a year doing theater. I did a bunch of side jobs. I was a ‘man with a van’—I had a moving company. I think what I would talk to myself about is, ‘You have to believe in your capacity.’ You have to believe that your capacity is greater than you could probably imagine. To me, this is a kind of divine question. God has given us talents and faculties, and it’s up to us to discover them, expand them to their maximum, and use them for maximum service in the world. I had a lot more capacity at 30 than I thought. I thought of myself as, ‘Well, I could get some acting work and maybe I could do an occasional guest spot on Law and Order and make enough money to just get by as an actor, so I don’t have to drive this damn moving van.’ That was the extent of where my imagination was for myself. So I would just say, ‘Believe in yourself more deeply. You’re bigger than that. Dream bigger,’ I would say.”
This was extremely refreshing to hear from Rainn, as I often feel the same:
“I’m in my head a lot, and it kind of sucks…. So there are certain tools that I have to use to get by. I’ve learned in my life that there are certain things I have to do to just be out of my head and get to normal. I’m not talking about being really supereffective. Just to get to normal, I have to do meditation, I have to do some exercise. If I can get into nature, great. If I can play some tennis, better, and acting is that same way. Acting, rehearsing, playing characters, these are the things that get me out of my head and out of analyzing every goddamn thing that comes down the pike and leaves me miserable and making really bad choices.”
As Oscar Wilde is thought to have said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken”:
“I was cast in a Broadway show when I was about 29 or 30 years old. It was my first Broadway show, and I sucked. I bombed. Again, I was very in my head. I was very stuck, cerebral, and stiff. I couldn’t get out of it, and I tried and I tried, but I was just terrible at the part.
“But after I finished that show, I thought: ‘You know what, fuck it. I’m never doing that again…. I can’t. Life is too short. I’m too miserable, and I’ve got to be me as an actor. I have to bring who I really am as a human to my acting. So I’m offbeat and I’m odd. I’m a weirdo. I buy shirts at the thrift store, and this is who I am, and this is who I have to be.’ It really changed me as an actor and as an artist…. I never would have had the success that I had in L.A. and on TV and film in doing odd characters if I hadn’t gone through that terrible, terrible ordeal.”
• Any final thoughts?
“I don’t want to sound like a pretentious asshole, but I would ask people to dig deeper. We can make the world a better place. We can ask more of ourselves. We can do more for others. I think that our life is a journey…. Dig deep on your journey and the world will benefit from it.”