by Rainn Wilson
Everyone who is at all successful in comedy has had a secret comedy dork life in their adolescence. Whether it’s sitcoms or stand-ups, wallowing in the muck of comedy and repeating classic routines and jokes through your teenage years is what gives every aspiring comic or comedic actor the seed of their absurdist imagination that later takes flower.
Looking back on this phase of my life, I’m incredibly grateful for these little tide pools of weirdo culture I swirled around in. In them I found my voice, my intellectual and artistic curiosity, and my passion. Stuck in basements and classrooms and practice rooms with the oddballs, the misfits, the bizarre ones, I felt at home. I still do to this day.
The amount of laughter and strange humor that was fermented in those bizarre petri dishes was staggering. To quote Barry Manilow: “Misfits aren’t misfits among other misfits.” (Note: I have no idea what Mr. Manilow was talking about, as he is obviously not a misfit but the insanely handsome voice of a generation. Adored by billions, he glows with the power of a thousand suns and sings like the angel Gabriel himself with the piercing might of a galactic supernova mounted on the forehead of Zeus.)
These days, the teenage years are considered a time for socializing with a focus on dating and popularity. When relieved of the pressures of dating too young, I believe a young person is better able to focus on who they really are and find themselves in that crucial time when your personality is beginning to germinate. It’s all that time reading, dreaming, and goofing off with fellow oddballs where our best selves get to evolve as teenagers.
I have always seen myself as an outsider. Not the outsider as portrayed in the movies by chain-smoking, brooding dudes with motorcycles and leather jackets, but the person who views himself as truly different and takes a keen, cold, critical eye to what society deems normal.
Later, when I would attend the Graduate Acting Program at NYU, my great acting teacher Ron Van Lieu would say to me that I needed to play misfits and outsiders. He predicted that it was playing characters who lived on the fringes that would bring me to life as an actor. That stuck with me always and has been a source of great strength as I’ve painted characters who are always on the other side of the fence looking in, who can never quite fit in or belong, who live in their awkwardness.
Becoming a “celebrity,” especially to someone who has always believed himself to be an outcast, is one of the strangest transitions a human being can ever go through. I always longed to be loved more than anything. And to belong and be accepted. And then, when that “love” became the type where I was recognized most everywhere I went, where I was lauded and complimented in restaurants or airports, asked to be in countless strangers’ cell phone pics, simply for appearing regularly on the television screen, the experience was brain-meltingly bizarre.
I’ll never forget the time I first knew I was famous, when total strangers started calling out my name and waving at me from cars as they drove by. I would look up, startled, quizzically wondering what friend or relative of mine it might be when said Dwight fans would shout out, “Hey, Dwight. WE LOOOOVE YOU!!!!” And that very first time I went into a Starbucks to find the word Dwight had been scrawled on the side of my coffee cup, the baristas snickering knowingly. Very strange, I would often think, mind reeling. Here I am, the former pimply bassoonist, chess enthusiast, and player of an elf thief at Norwescon, and now, a few short decades later, hailed as a weird TV icon by complete strangers. Exhilarating and incredibly challenging at the same time.
Chapter 6
HOW ELVIS COSTELLO MADE ME AN ACTOR
—
Two things happened to me when I turned sixteen. I discovered punk rock and I moved to Chicago.
In suburban Seattle there were two radio stations: KISW and KZOK. If you didn’t listen to those you were pummeled into oblivion by the rockers that be. They played one kind of music only: CLASSIC ROCK ROCK rock rock rock rock!!!!!
Then, out of the blue, a friend gave me some cassette tapes she had recorded from her hi-fi player: the Clash’s London Calling, the Police’s Reggatta de Blanc and Outlandos d’Amour, Squeeze’s East Side Story, and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. My world was turned upside down and inside out in an instant, and my ears pinwheeled in delight.
After years of Billy Squier, Van Hagar, Air Supply, and Styx, I had never dreamed music like this existed anywhere. Sure, classic rock was awesome in its way, but the bloated, obvious, macho crooning and endless midtempo guitar solos were becoming an ear-sickening cliché. Nineteen eighty-two brought us some great radio fare, such as Queen and the Cars and Cheap Trick and Blondie and ELO, who all crafted some delightful tunes, but the angry young men of punk and new wave, with their whip-smart lyrics and rebellious melodies, made musical and lyrical explosions that completely captured my soul.
I listened to those cassettes until they snapped and I had to repair them by unwinding the brown ribbon, securing the snapped break point with dabs of Scotch tape, and rewinding with a pencil in the spokes.
—
Soon thereafter I would discover XTC, the Psychedelic Furs, Oingo Boingo, Gang of Four, the B-52s, Joy Division, X, Black Flag, Talking Heads, the English Beat, the Specials, and many more bands from that incredible era of music.
The music did a lot more than just entertain me. For a lot of us in that post-punk time, the music opened up a new way of thinking about the world. It was sarcastic and edgy and emotional and raw and perfectly defined our subculture’s view that we were the smart outsiders looking in at all the bloated, indulgent, hypocritical crap of our materialistic culture.
In 1982, when my fairly miserable family found out my dad had gotten offered a pretty good job as an administrator at the Baha’i National Center in Evanston, Illinois, we jumped at the chance.
The only drawback was that I would have to leave my very first girlfriend, Jill. She was pretty in a Northwest-girl way (solid, fresh faced, and at home in the moss) and universally renowned as being the smartest person at Shorecrest. She found my loser idiocy charming for some odd reason. We had started dating a mere month or so before I knew I was moving. This “dating” consisted of going to movies and then spending a few hours making out and holding hands and feeling somewhat guilty about it. I was devastated as my family packed up our meager belongings and drove east, like a trio of Baha’i Joads. I listened to sad songs on cassette tape over and over again, the prairies and mountains streaming by outside, as I piloted the family 1981 Mustang hatchback filled with boxes of sci-fi books and my parents followed glumly behind in a U-Haul. (What did they talk about over those two thousand miles, I wonder.) Once I got into my new high school, Jill was quickly forgotten about, alas. Such is youth.
—
New Trier High School was (and still is) a very well-known institution. It was in the tony suburbs north of Chicago and was nationally renowned for its academics and arts programs. Because most schools are funded by local property taxes, the school was flush with cash. It had a huge drama department, a dance wing, a TV/film program, and a radio station with a huge blinking radio tower on top of the building. Many famous people had gone there, American icons such as Ann-Margret, Bruce Dern, Charlton Heston, and laugh-a-minute former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.
We moved into literally the only apartment building that was within the school’s expensive radius. It was a 1970s three-story bland edifice across the street from the “El” station in Wilmette. We lived in a two-bedroom, eight-hundred-square-foot, shag-carpeted box, while the kids I went to school with lived in impressive North Shore mansions of some kind or other. I’m not claiming poverty, just a certain kind of street cred that comes from being a character straight out of a John Hughes movie: poor, geeky, new wave kid moves into rich Chicago high school and finds self. (And, speaking of John Hughes movies, I was most certainly metaphorically in one, because New Trier was the high school most of his films were modeled on. The exterior was even featured in a diffe
rent classic of the era, Risky Business.)
I saw an opportunity in coming to this new school and I took it. I did two things immediately: I started attempting to dress a version of “new wave punky bohemian” (instead of “suburban Seattle wide-legger,” with feathered hair and grotesque wide-legged jeans), and I signed up for acting classes.
—
One great thing about moving as a teenager is that you can reinvent yourself. When the privileged prepsters of New Trier met the new kid named Rainn with ripped-up Levi’s, rectangular sunglasses, and a skinny piano tie, they had an entirely different perception of who I was from the folks I’d left behind in Seattle. I was like geeky Anthony Michael Hall with just a dash of dashing Andrew McCarthy.
Then, it happened. My past and my future collided, imploded, and exploded over the course of one three-minute period of time in Mr. Routenberg’s* acting class during the first week of school. It was the perfect storm of my reinvention, where new wave music and my future life as an actor all came cascading together like a supernova. It was like a volcano flew directly into a cosmic superstorm and they both ignited like a bazooka at an AC/DC concert. Fasten your seat belts, America. It’s that big.
So the very first assignment Mr. Routenberg gave us was called “Private in Public” or “Private Moment.” The task was to come into the classroom with some props from home and “live” in front of the audience as if you were alone and in private. It was like the audience was peeking voyeuristically into someone’s real, unadorned life. The point of the exercise was to allow us as actors to experience simply “being” in front of an audience instead of performing, illustrating, or “indicating.” (“Indicating” is one of the worst crimes an actor can commit. Instead of experiencing a moment or an emotion, the actor performs and amplifies that moment in such a way that the audience will “get it.” For instance, instead of just feeling angry, the actor will make his face red and shake his fist, thus “showing the audience” what he is feeling. Guilty!)
Not exactly getting the point of the exercise, I brought in a boom box and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True on cassette. I fiddled around in my imaginary bedroom for a while and then put the song on in front of the class. I danced and sang and lip-synced and pranced around like a maniac to the kinetic rhythm of the song. Was it a private moment shared in front of a public audience? Well, kind of. After all, I would sometimes act out similar rock-and-roll fantasies in the privacy of my bedroom, but mostly it was a straight-up performance of what I do best, goofing around and looking like a total doofarooni.
The class went ballistic. Here was this new, odd alterna-dude in his black blazer and English Beat T-shirt doing some cool, funny shtick. And then, when the bell rang, all these incredibly pretty drama girls came over to me and asked my name and complimented me and patted me on the back and smiled and told me I should audition for the upcoming play and welcomed me to the school and the class and asked me to sit with them at their lunch table.
I was struck dumb. My face was flushed. My heart and brain were on fire. Oprah talks about “aha” moments. Well, this was like an “AAAAAHAAAAA!!!!” moment. I felt a sense of purpose and belonging, and in that exact instant, an actor was born.
—
That was one of the defining moments of my life. We can all boil down our lives to a handful of specific moments, I believe. A crossroads, a thin beam of light through a pinhole in the side of a shoe box where time stands still. Most of those moments happen to us between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. That’s when life is richest and ripest, and the vibrant memory banks are pulsating with maximum power, energy, and emotion.
I wish I could say that I became an actor because of my love of the craft and my soul’s mission and my heart’s longing to express itself. Nope. It was the girls. Girls, the thing in God’s glorious universe that I knew the least about and terrified me more than anything. But isn’t that what drives us all, anyway, at the beginning? Attention from the opposite sex? Status? Power? Self-esteem derived from external validation?
I suppose what we strive for is to ultimately let go of those more selfish, animalistic forces and seek a more mature, reasonable, balanced, and enlightened sense of purpose. Altruism, perhaps. Moral imperative. Service. God. The universe. Compassion. Nowadays I like to think I pursue my craft for the art, the challenge, the transcendence of the thing. Or to provide a service by getting a good laugh from an audience. But sometimes it all just begins with the girls.
I can still see me there, folded into the little desk in the corner of the acting classroom at New Trier High School in 1983, being chatted up by Bess Meyer, Terri Kapsalis, and Tria Smith, glowing with possibility. I have great compassion for that gangly, pale sixteen-year-old, his life moving in an entirely new direction thanks to a desire to reinvent himself, a gift for goofing off, some attention from girls, and his new spirit guide, Elvis Costello.
And so, after that fateful day, I DID audition for the fall production of Time Out for Ginger, a ridiculous play from the fifties, in which I played the dad of one Ginger, a girl who wanted to join the football team and caused an uproar in small-town America. (I wasn’t very good, FYI.)
Those were good and fruitful years at New Trier. I acted in a ton of plays and made a lot of good friends. Chess, MUN, and D&D faded away and roles in Ah, Wilderness!, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pygmalion, Story Theatre, and Oklahoma! became the center of my universe. (Although I still played the GD bassoon for some unknown reason. I just couldn’t stop wrapping my lips around that crazy fagotto, I guess.)
I had crossed over. Not from the movie cliché of unpopular to popular. I had crossed over within subgenres, you see. I had moved from regular old geek/nerd to the very top of the geek/nerd hierarchy, DRAMA geek/nerd. And the reason that drama geeks are at the pinnacle of that food pyramid of geekdom? It’s not the tragedy/comedy logo or Cats pins on the raincoats. It’s not the black eyeliner on both the boys and the girls. Neither is it the ability to burst into song or a tap dance in the school hallway at the drop of a theater reference. No. The thing that separates theater dorks from the rest is one word . . . you guessed it . . . once again . . . girls. There were and are and always will be pretty girls who sing and dance and act and improvise and joke around and are willing to make fools of themselves. And—and this is the most important point of all—and they’re willing to hang out with geeky guys and even go to wrap parties and occasionally make out with them. This sets up drama geeks as the lions of the dork Serengeti.
—
Once, while playing Alfred Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion (the original play version upon which My Fair Lady was based), I had a magical moment onstage, the kind when the acting gods blow their golden muse breath down on you. I was in Professor Higgins’s apartment (who, by the way, was played by the incredible actor Jim True-Frost, who later joined Steppenwolf and then created Detective “Prez” Pryzbylewski on The Wire as well as many other memorable roles), railing on about “middle-class morality” when I spied a pile of prop candies lying in a bowl on a downstage table. Without missing a beat, completely unrehearsed on opening night, in front of an audience of several hundred people, I made some grand gesture toward the folks upstage and with a deft sleight of hand, picked up the bowl, effortlessly sliding all the candies into my pants pocket. The audience erupted in a wave of laughter. Oh, lordy, that felt mighty good. And that’s what we actors go for, those intangible, miraculous moments when something clicks and you are living a spontaneous, creative life in the shoes of the character, connected to the audience and flowing with the mysterious, gooey stuff of life. (Translation for atheists and materialists: Your synapses fire, causing a spontaneous behavior, which triggers a pleasant surprise auditory response from the viewers and consequently pleasure endorphins are released into your cerebellum, causing you to want to repeat the action for another release of chemicals in your opiate receptors.)
Deep inside of my selfity self, over th
e course of my gradual immersion into the world of high school theater, I sensed there was something to this acting thing, and that occasionally I had the ability to make people laugh, and that when I did that, I felt a pleasure greater than the great sexy-gasm itself. I had an inner mission that began to percolate. Perhaps, I thought, I might actually be able to do this acting thing as a career. This was the deepest, tiniest little flower of hope that I had ever before nurtured. Could it be? Could there be a universe in which I, northern gangly loser, could even consider the possibility of a world in which someday, somehow, people would cast me in plays and pay me to act in them? It seemed absurd, too far-reaching, too hubris-y. After all, I had never, ever met an actual person who made their living being an artist. But there was only one thing left to do: ask my drama teacher.
—
Suzanne Adams was the perfect companion teacher to Mr. Routenberg. While he was serious and soft-spoken, she was a wild child: emphatic, passionate, energetic, sensitive, demonstrative, and a little bit “cuckoo bird.” But she was better than any acting teacher I had in college (until I went to NYU). Ms. Adams would make us improvise our parts as if we were animals, improvise on cue, and dig for the truth with great abandon. She had a glorious mystical side that I really responded to and was always talking about how we were all made of luminous stardust (this was WAY before Deepak Chopra, mind you), and she would literally pray to the gods of the theater before shows.
So I went into her office after class one day and fitfully, timidly, cautiously asked her . . . “Do you, uh, think, uh, that maybe, um, one day I might, perhaps, I could one day, maybe become a professional actor someday?”