The man with the Dwight stuff

His parents have only just learned to pay the rent. He thinks British people are 'pot-bellied weirdos'. And he's one of the sexiest men alive, according to one magazine. Hadley Freeman meets Rainn Wilson
Rainn Wilson
'Enjoying his late success' ... Rainn Wilson. Photograph Teri Pengilley Teri Pengilley/Guardian

It is always difficult meeting an actor from a TV show; yes, yes, he might look like the character he plays, but you have to remind yourself that this doesn't mean he is like the character. Interviewing Rainn Wilson, who plays the very nerdy but ever so slightly scary office suck-up Dwight K Schrute on the US version of The Office, presents a somewhat unexpected problem. Weirdly, he doesn't physically resemble the character at all - he is much softer, perhaps a little podgier, than he appears on TV, and Dwight's eternal scowl is swapped for a permanent expression of ironic bemusement.

But talking to him is a decidedly Dwight-ish experience, which is to say it's a little bit unnerving, often hilarious and very, very weird. In the two hours we spend together, conversation moves blithely from sci-fi to imperialism to how religion controls his life. He talks in Dwight's slow, drawling monotone, with unexpected bursts into emphases and a very dry humour. When he finds something funny, instead of laughing he simply says "That's hilarious," with the facial expression most would adopt when announcing an impending apocalypse.

He finds my name fascinating and utters it as often and as emphatically as possible ("Have some tea, HADLEY", "That's an interesting question, HADLEY") and while I'm quite used to people finding my name hilarious, it does seem a bit rich coming from someone called Rainn, whose wife is called Holiday Reinhorn.

Despite his obvious intelligence, he has that very American (and I say that as an American), and somewhat Dwightish, gauche belief that there is nothing foreigners find funnier than being mocked to their faces. Each time the slightly starstruck waitress comes by to check if we're enjoying our "Wimbledon tea" (chocolate dipped strawberries, tarts, tea and cream), he replies in a British accent that would make Dick van Dyke weep.

We meet in an anonymous London hotel, where he is promoting The Rocker - basically an even sillier version of School of Rock. Wilson stars as Fish, a frustrated thirtysomething whose ejection from a metal band as a teenager has caused a lifetime of resentment, exacerbated by the band's subsequent worldwide domination. Through plot machinations that need not be examined too closely, he joins his teenage nephew's band and gets a second chance at musical fame.

But if the plot is vaguely familiar, then the other faces are, too: alongside Wilson are Christina Applegate, Emma Stone and Jane Lynch, all of whom have appeared in movies directed or produced by Judd Apatow, the current king of Hollywood comedy. So is Wilson part of Apatow's clique? "I don't really know if I'm part of any group, to be honest," he says, in one of his few genuine moments in the interview. "But hopefully we'll all be working together one day."

Although Wilson is not yet a movie star, he is very much at the heart of The Office: An American Workplace, in the role taken in Britain by Mackenzie Crook. After some initial shakiness ("The pilot was pretty dreadful"), the show has achieved a success comparable to Ricky Gervais's original in the US. Although there are structural similarities between the two shows - there is a smarmy boss, a pretty receptionist, a lovelorn worker and his nemesis the office suck-up - it is actually very different from, and much better than, the UK version. For a start, it's much more generous: all of the characters have interesting storylines and inner lives. Dwight even gets to have a little office romance with the uptight and very Christian Angela - "Oh yeah, that was a good time" - which Gareth certainly didn't. But it is also a far bigger proposition than the British version: whereas the latter made only a dozen episodes, the Americans have made more than five times that many and the show is still going.

Yet it's clear that Wilson, after only a few days in London, is tired of defending his version to the Ricky Gervais fans.

"Being in London's been really interesting. I was looking around the other day and I thought, how did these odd, snaggle-toothed, pasty, eccentric, red-faced, pot-bellied weirdos control the world? I mean, you guys once dominated everywhere! But then you talk to British fans of the British show, there is this persistence and pride in it, like real British bulldogs, and I was like, 'Oh, I get it!' If you took that pride over the English Office and applied it to imperialism again, you would conquer the whole world, from corner to corner."

Wilson was born "possibly on a houseboat" and raised in Seattle, Washington. "No brothers, no sisters. What a lonely life I led," he says mournfully. However, he had plenty of entertainment from his parents: his father worked as an abstract painter, a science fiction writer (mainly unpublished) and a sewage worker. His mother was a performance artist and had a penchant for painting her body blue and running around naked on stage. Would he describe them as weird? "Yes," he replies instantly. "They're still pretty weird, though they probably think they're really normal now because they've learned how to pay rent occasionally." His father has just finished his latest science fiction book, The Zombies of Gog ("I told him he needs to change that title as soon as possible") which Wilson describes as "pretty nifty".

His parents were, he adds superfluously, "weird bohemian types". So is his name a reflection of their hippy leanings? "Yeah. Although I guess Rain with just one N was too hippyish even for them. I tell everyone the extra N is for extra nookie." It must have been a terrible name to have at school. "Oh yeah. Teased, bullied, beat up, everything. And from that crucible of pain," he concludes with a dramatic lowering of his eyes, "I emerged, the sad clown that you see today."

In fact, his name wasn't an expression of his parents' love for nature, but rather in honour of Rainer Maria Rilke, making him probably the only person on American TV named after a modern German poet. And really, it was a lucky escape: his mother wanted to name him Thucydides.

His family was, he mentions several times, very poor, but every week when he was a child his father would take him to the university bookstore and say, "Go, buy as many books as you like." Wilson would come back with about 20 books, which his father would buy without a blink. Mainly he was into sci-fi then, influenced by his father, and to this day he has a huge collection of sci-fi paperbacks - "many of which are collectibles," he says, with Dwightish pride. These days, though, his reading tastes have moved on a little: "Yeah, not too much sci-fi. Mainly just fi."

When Wilson was a teenager, he and his family moved to Chicago where his parents ran a Bahá'í centre. The Bahá'í faith - in essence, a belief in the unity of all religions - holds a huge amount of importance in Wilson's life, and for only the second time in our two hours together he talks without any irony. "It's a long story, but I abandoned it all when I was younger. And then about eight years ago I went on a spiritual journey that led me ultimately back to the Bahá'í faith as it was the only one that made sense to me," he says. Does it affect his work choices? "Absolutely! Often I get sent things that I find morally reprehensible, and this is coming from a guy promoting a movie in which he shows his ass crack throughout. But there's some stuff that is just wrong, such as violence or humour that is grotesque or mean-spirited or really sexist. It doesn't make the world a better place."

He first started acting at school in Chicago. He was cast as the lead in his school play and then that epiphanical event happened that has put so many actors on to the path to stardom: "Girls started liking me. Before then, I'd never had any interest from the ladies. So really, my course was clear."

Clear, if not exactly in the fast lane. For the next 20 years, Wilson struggled from bit part to bit part. He ran a removals company in New York ("I was the guy who could fit the futon down any staircase") before finally getting cast as an undertaker in Six Feet Under and then The Office when he was 39.

He is clearly enjoying late success. He's already made several other movies and is writing a film about a ninja, which he and Jason Reitman (Juno) plan to start filming next summer. But the biggest accolade was being voted one of People magazine's 50 Sexiest People. How did that feel? "Pretty sexy. I knew I'd arrived," he says, with no small amount of satisfaction. And how did his wife feel? "She was so excited she told me to clean out the garage."

· The Rocker is released on October 17