Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosTime away from ‘The Office’ for faith
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: June 23. 2009 4:00AM PSTRainn Wilson to speak on ‘art and faith’
FACT: As Dwight Schrute on “The Office,” actor Rainn Wilson steals his share of scenes, and then some. Wilson plays a key role on the popular sitcom as Schrute, paper salesman and part-time beet farmer and relentlessly ambitious suck-up with an authoritarian streak.
The 43-year-old actor, who will speak this week in Bend, made his breakthrough to larger success in 2003 on HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” Since landing the choice role of Dwight Schrute, he starred as a not-quite washed-up ’80s metal drummer in last year’s comedy film “The Rocker,” and in 2010, he’ll appear with Natalie Portman in the film “Hesher.”
However, unforgettable though they may be, there’s a lot more to Wilson than the intense characters he plays on TV and in films. Wilson, who was raised in and continues to practice the Baha’i Faith, has said he’s turned down “morally repugnant” roles.
He’s also a founder and participant in the Web site www.soulpancake.com. “We call it a site for life’s big questions,” Wilson tells The Bulletin. “And that’s really what it’s about, for people to dig into why we’re alive and debate life’s big questions.”
Wilson believes that creativity, spirituality and philosophy are largely absent online.
“And the Internet is such a land of crap I wanted to help try to make it a better place,” he says, in the same dry tone you’d expect to hear Schrute employ.
These matters of art and the heart will come together when Wilson speaks on the subject of “Art and Faith” Thursday at the Old Stone Church in Bend (see “If you go”).
Wilson spoke to The Bulletin on Friday from his second home near Bend, which he and his wife, author Holiday Reinhorn, share with her parents. Home most of the year is just outside of Los Angeles, but they visit Central Oregon often.
“We usually go skiing when I’m out here in the winter,” he says. “We took our honeymoon at the Metolius River. Our family friends had a cabin, so we rented the cabin for a couple of weeks.”
Now, much of his time in the area is spent finding fun things to do with his 4½-year-old son. “It’s really about finding cool activities to do with him. Take him on little hikes and boat trips and fishing expeditions,” he says.
QUESTION: Is he into fishing?
“No. Me? No. Not so much. I’m more the indoors type,” he says. “But I love being out in nature. I love doing day hikes. And I think we’ll buy a little tent and maybe camp out in the yard, as a first step towards doing some real camping.”
Wilson adds that “there’s a really nice Baha’i community here in Central Oregon,” referring to the Baha’is of Central Oregon, which is sponsoring Thursday’s talk.
The Soul Pancake site launched in March, and Wilson says that when “Office” co-star Ed Helms asked him about it, “I was like, ‘It’s really kind of exploring creativity and spirituality.’
“And he goes, ‘Now that seems weird. Those things are mutually exclusive, aren’t they?’ And I think that’s what people think.”
Not Wilson. Growing up in the Baha’i Faith, “my family was always reading religious books and Sufi poetry and philosophy books,” he says.
He believes spirituality and creativity aren’t necessarily separate endeavors in other cultures, either. “I think it’s only in our culture that there is no link between creativity and spirituality,” he says. “I think in most every other culture in the world, the two are intricately bound.”
The Baha’i Faith is the second-fastest-growing religion in the world, according to Foreign Policy Magazine. While it’s difficult to sum up the faith in a nutshell, he’s game to give it a try.
“Baha’is believe that there is only one God, and so Baha’is believe that there is only one religion, so Muslims and Christians and Jews and Buddhists are all praying to, or meditating around, one God.”
Fortunately for viewers, he never found anything morally repugnant about playing Dwight Schrute on “The Office.”
Wilson says he “absolutely” enjoys playing Schrute, a character who puts all his faith in his boss, Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell), as well as Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company for which they work.
“The greatest thing about playing Dwight is that the writers keep coming up with really cool, interesting stuff for him,” he says. “In the hands of lesser writers, he would just kind of do the same annoying, dweeby stuff week after week. But they make him complex. They give him romance and power struggles and personal turmoil and friendships and all kinds of different color.”
FACT: When sitting at his desk in the background of scenes in “The Office,” Wilson is “creating code for the (Soul Pancake) Web site.”
A beat later: “Not really; I’m joking,” he says.
“Usually, the most we can do is surf some articles on CNN.com or something like that, because we’re probably needed for reactions at any given moment, so we really can’t do work on the computers there in the office. That’s a myth.”
Which means he’ll have to moonlight when working on Soul Pancake, which he’s mostly promoted through his Twitter page. Soul Pancake is doing “amazing,” he says. “We’re up to almost 3 million page views, and we’ve only been live for eight or 10 weeks at this point. I’ve mostly been promoting it from my Twitter page. We haven’t even done any interviews about it or promotion. People have just been finding it.”
Of course it probably helps to have a TV and film star involved.
The bottom line, says Wilson, “is, as I was getting more famous, I wanted to put my energy and attention toward stuff that is important to me. In this case, it’s creativity and spirituality and philosophy.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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