by Rainn Wilson
ADVENTURES IN FILM AND TELEVISION
—
ONE LIFE TO LIVE
Dear Diary, I got my first television job, you guys, right here in 1997! It’s playing Casey Keegan, a homicidal stand-up comic on the soap opera One Life to Live. I’m doing five episodes shot over three days and I get $750 an episode. (Minus the $1,200 I have to pay to join AFTRA, the union.) I’m set for life!
The first day went pretty well. The actor who played the hunky Santiago thought we were rehearsing a scene when, in fact, they were shooting it and the director wanted to move on after just one take. Santiago went ballistic, kicking over furniture and swearing at the producers. They shut down production for a couple of hours, he calmed down, and then we proceeded. I guess that’s how TV stars act. . . . Maybe one day I’ll be a TV star and do the exact same thing!
Day two: tons of action! I tried to poison Santiago at the comedy club I was working at, but he wouldn’t drink from the concoction I made for him (probably because it turned green and started smoking). So the mob guy who wanted me to kill him slipped me a gun. The camera lingered on my gigantic, terrified face, staring at my “piece,” as they went to a commercial break. I got tingles!
After lunch break I did a set of real stand-up comedy in character at the fictional Comedy Club. The monologue was written by the amazing joke writers on the staff of One Life to Live. My favorite? Easy. “What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake? One less drunk!” The seven extras seemed to really eat it up.
Day three, I tried to kill Santiago (with my gun!), but his stupid girlfriend was a cop and pinned me to the roof in an incredible stunt worthy of a Mission Impossible film. They interrogated me in a comfy chair and ultimately let me go because I tearfully pleaded with them so successfully!
Later that week I got my first fan letter! The developmentally disabled girl who wrote me said, and I quote, “Dear Casey Keegan, I think you are good actress.”
And later still, when the episodes aired, I actually got RECOGNIZED as an actor! For the VERY FIRST TIME!!! Folks would stop me on the subway and say, “Hey, you that guy who tried to kill my man Santiago? You do not f*#* with Santiago!”
And that’s a wrap, folks. Probably the last TV I’ll ever do, but I had a blast!
CHARMED
Believe it or not the worst acting I ever did in my life was not on One Life to Live but on the TV show Charmed in 2001. I was cast as Kierkan the demon alchemist who created a beautiful woman/demon in his demon lab.
I was crazy nervous about doing a big guest-star role on a hit TV show. I was also unsure how to play this larger-than-life supernatural weirdo who spent the episode running around in his purple gossamer robes, chasing Terra, the demon seductress who had escaped his lab. I remember I had terrible BO from my nerves and the heavy polyester robes and kept hoping that Alyssa Milano, Shannen Doherty, and that other one wouldn’t get too close and notice. My acting was so forced, stilted, and unnatural, I’m sure the telegenic witches wanted nothing to do with me.
One memory: that the leads would shoot a scene and then beg to “move on” after one take. This differed from The Office in the sense that it was the exact opposite. We’d always beg for more takes.
FULL FRONTAL
Getting cut out of a movie is one of the worst things that can happen to an actor. Getting cut out of a movie when the director is Steven Soderbergh and you’re at the premiere and don’t know you’ve been cut out is the absolute worst.
Very early on in my Hollywood career I got cast in a small but terrific part opposite Catherine Keener in Full Frontal. The original script was entitled How to Survive a Hotel Room Fire and was a fascinating, experimental narrative exploration of the underbelly of American commerce. I had a lot of fun shooting my scene and everyone was very nice.
I was invited to the small premiere and said hello to everyone, and people treated me very awkwardly, recoiling oddly. My wife and I watched the movie and when it came to the scene, the scene I was so excited to see, my first scene in a STEVEN SODERBERGH MOVIE, all you saw was the back of my enormous round head as the camera stayed on Catherine Keener for the entire twelve seconds of what had been originally a three-page scene.
(FYI, the entire movie had obviously been all improvised on the fly and was one of the worst, lamest pieces of experimental film poo that had ever been excreted onto a screen.)
My heart sank into my chest. We slunk out through the party in the lobby with all the people slapping each other on the back and laughing, went out to my 1993 Volvo clunker, and drove up to the Griffith Observatory, traumatized. I sat devastated in the car as Holiday put her arm around me and we gazed at the stars over the City of Angels.
(Note to directors and producers: If you cut someone out of a movie, that’s totally cool. Just give them a call and let them know ahead of time. Takes about thirty seconds.)
SLICE O’ LIFE
One of the oddest acting jobs I’ve ever had is one that never happened.
I was on my way to a table read for a new ABC single-camera comedy pilot, called Slice o’ Life, with Janeane Garofalo, when I first heard about the “American Office.” I ran into a guy I knew at Universal Television in the parking lot and he told me they had just secured the rights. I had recently been watching the original BBC episodes and had been captivated. (More on that later.) I remember getting super bummed out, because although I was enthused to be doing a funny pilot with the great Janeane Garofalo, I would have MUCH rather been doing the pilot for The Office as that was my absolute dream TV job.
It was a terrific cast for Slice o’ Life, including Bob Odenkirk and Marc Maron. We were excited as we gathered to read the script aloud. We were all packed, had our plane tickets to leave that night, and the set was all built and ready in Vancouver, British Columbia.
For those of you who don’t know, “table reads” are this very peculiar, particular Hollywood television phenomenon. The cast gathers at a long table with their scripts and all the executives file into the audience of the enormous rehearsal room, stoic and impeccably dressed. These are nerve-wracking events at which actors occasionally get fired due to the weakness of their “read.”*
This table read was happening in the period not long after 9/11 during which Janeane Garofalo, who was a very vocal spokesperson for the political left in the media, had become quite unpopular with the Fox News set. She was a polarizing figure, to say the least.
Anyhoo, we did the table read and it SUCKED. Janeane seemed quite nervous, we didn’t get any laughs, and the phalanx of ABC execs marched out of the room in a huff. (It certainly didn’t help her case with the network that she wore torn black jeans, tons of punk jewelry, and a cut-off Black Flag T-shirt that showed all her tattoos.) Within the hour, the plug was pulled, our plane tickets canceled, and the project killed.
Many speculated that it was Janeane’s anti-American politics that got the show canceled. Some said it was her likability issues for an ABC sitcom. Others, the script. I say it’s the incredibly artificial, awkward, and bizarre tradition of judging the worth of a project by having actors nervously read a script (that’s meant to be filmed on camera) in a huge rehearsal hall filled with inscrutable executives.
Needless to say, I was secretly psyched that I would soon get an audition for The Office now that Slice o’ Life was officially Slice o’ Death.
SAHARA
Somewhere between Six Feet Under and The Office, I got cast in Sahara, the lawsuit-addled McConaughey action extravaganza known as the biggest independent film bomb in cinema history. Due to the discovery on the lawsuit by Clive Cussler against the film, my salary on Sahara, 45K, the SAG minimum, was there for all the world to see. I literally was paid less on that film than Matthew McConaughey’s stunt double. I did, however, have an absolute and total blast. A month in Morocco and two weeks in Barcelona—what’s not to like?
There are so many great memories of t
his bloated, ridiculous (and really fun) film, I can’t even list them all. Actually, I can.
Bargaining like a madman for rugs with merchants over mint tea in the middle of the desert with the cast of the film.
Wandering the back alleys of Marrakech with my pregnant wife, Holiday, looking for tribal antiques. (We once stumbled accidentally down an alley and into a wall of violent stench, the remote area of the city where they slaughtered all the chickens, and she passed out and vomited into her hand.) We held hands through outlandish bazaars, wanting to share the sights and sounds of Morocco with our beautiful little fetus.
Playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour in Steve Zahn’s trailer during a literal plague of locusts.
Spending day upon day on a speedboat (for all the rip-roaring water chase scenes) on a beautiful alpine lake in the mountains. We would get there crazy early every morning and get to watch the sun rise over the Atlas Mountains. Gorgeous.
Getting lost in the medieval maze of the city of Fez while being hounded by a gang of scraggly Moroccan kids all saying, “Meester! Meester! Americain? Hellooo. How are YOOOO?”
A camel ride in the dunes where The Mummy and Star Wars were filmed. The road literally ends, sloping down into the sands of the Sahara at Erfoud, and there’s an arrow-shaped sign that says TIMBUKTU 52 JOURS pointing out into the vastness. And the crazy thing? Dudes are riding donkeys and camels and motorcycles out into that vastness, loaded up with wares from the market. People actually live out there!
My four-months-pregnant wife getting McDonald’s cravings and us eating McNuggets and milkshakes at the Marrakech McDonald’s. EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT.
Visiting monkeys that live in remote passes of the Atlas Mountains with my driver, Zaid, when he counseled me that I needed to get a second, more “dutiful” wife once our child was born, as mine was far too challenging and independent.
Marveling at the exquisite, chiseled, bronze manliness of Matthew McConaughey and the exquisite, chiseled, bronze womanliness of Penélope Cruz as they circled each other like Aphrodite and Apollo and began their ill-fated, gossip-rag-fodder relationship. I imagine that they never actually made love, they just looked at each other incredulously and said, “You’re sooooo beautiful,” “No, you’re so beautiful.” Over and over and over again.
THE ROCKER
When the comet of my Dwight fame was at its zenith, I got to star in a comedy movie for Fox called The Rocker. I played Robert “Fish” Fishman, a former heavy metal drummer for the fictional band Vesuvius, who had been kicked out right before they made it big. A loser at forty, he’s enlisted to play again for his high school–age nephew’s rock band and goes on the road, finally getting to live his rock-and-roll dream. Hilarity ensues.
I was completely unproven as a lead in films, so it was a huge risk for Fox to green-light this picture. They weren’t going to give the film the go-ahead until our producers, Shawn Levy and Tom McNulty, went into the office of the big cheese at Fox, Tom Rothman, with a plan. When Tom posited his many reservations about the project to them, they were ready. One of his main issues, apparently, aside from the fact that I was completely untested as a movie star, was his concern that I wasn’t “rock and roll” enough. He thought Dwight was a funny character, but I didn’t, as an actor, have that “rock vibe” that the character of Fish needed. As if on cue, Shawn and Tom opened a laptop, where they had a scene from The Office cued up. It was Michael and I on the roof, from the episode entitled “Safety Training.” Dwight was doing air guitar and singing a heavy metal riff to celebrate. “Kiss the sun!” I sang in ridiculous metalhead full voice. They stopped the clip. There was a pause. “Okay, go ahead and do the movie,” Tom Rothman said. And with that twenty-second clip, the film was green-lit for fourteen million dollars and we were off and running.
We managed to gather together one of the best comedic ensembles of all time for the film, including Christina Applegate, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Fred Armisen, Jeff Garlin, Jane Lynch, Demetri Martin, and Josh Gad. Our director, Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), brought a ton of warmth and humor to the shoot.
It was a brutal, low-budget filming experience, with long hours, little luxury, and TONS of sweaty locations and night shoots. All the while I had to learn the drums to be believable as a great rock drummer. Not only did I need to learn the basics of drumming, but I also had to specifically learn each song that was composed for the film, as they rolled in from the composer, in order to play along believably in the film. I had a drum coach and a little drum kit in my tiny half trailer that I would bang away on during breaks.
Then came the editing and the long wait before the release. After moving the premiere date four different times, Fox essentially dumped it in a bunch of theaters over Labor Day weekend in the summer of 2008, even though the movie tested quite well with audiences. It bombed. And how. In fact, The Rocker was one of the biggest bombs in movie history. The per-screen average was one of the very lowest of all time. The film went out on over twenty-five hundred screens (on one of the worst weekends for movies of the year, in one of the most crowded comedy summers ever—Tropic Thunder and Step Brothers had just come out a few weeks before), and it only sold an average of $259 per showing. We came in twelfth on the opening weekend for a total of $2.8 million and the film only made $6.8 million in total at the box office. Which sucks. Big-time. That essentially translates to: NOBODY WANTED TO SEE RAINN WILSON STARRING IN A MOVIE AS A NAKED DRUMMER. America had spoken with their pocketbooks. I was done for as a “movie star.”
This was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I had poured my heart and soul into the film as well as into its promotion. I genuinely believed (and still believe) that it’s a terrific family film, with great music and a ton of heart. I was devastated.
It’s the Tuesday morning after the Rockalypse, five thirty a.m. I’m driving to work in my Prius down the desolate 101 freeway, absolutely spent and miserable. Kevin and Bean from KROQ are on the radio. They start yappin’ like puppies on helium about the weekend movies and the top-ten box-office list. “Wait a minute,” one of them says, “what about that Rainn Wilson comedy? I don’t even see it on the list.” “OOOOOOH NOOOOOO!” the other DJ says. “Look here. It opened all the way down at number twelve!” “Oooooooh, ouch! That’s gotta sting! Poor Rainn, the guy must be hurting right now. Oooooooh, poor guy. It BOMBED!” Their voices ring with pity and concern throughout the crappy interior of my Prius.
I started to cry, tears sliding down my cheeks, driving down the pitch-black, predawn 101 to my job at The Office, where, fortunately, the cast and crew cheerily and diplomatically didn’t mention the film or ask how it performed. Thank God I had a pretty good day job.
SUPER
Super, written and directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), was perhaps the greatest film I’ll ever be a part of. Jenna Fischer of The Office used to be married to James and one day said to him, “You know who would be perfect for that old screenplay you wrote? Rainn!”
James was intrigued. Later, I was hanging out with Jenna at her receptionist desk, chomping on the candy in the little clear plastic candy dispenser, when she told me of her conversation with him.
“Send it over!” I said. By the time I got back to my trailer, James had sent it to my inbox and I started to read.
By the time I got to the part where the lead character, Frank, was having a two-page prayer monologue and then had his head cut open and his brain touched by the finger of God, I knew that this was one of the greatest things of all time.
I called James half an hour later, only halfway through the script.
I said, “I have to play this part. I love it. This script is incredible. Let’s do it.”
We hit the pavement, James and I, trying to raise the money to make the film during the depths of the recession in 2008. It was tough. We must have visited a dozen production companies. Eventually, with Miranda
Bailey and Ted Hope on board as producers, we were able to gather our dream cast—Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, and Nathan Fillion. And the rest is history. (If you can call it “history” when you make a great indie film that no one watches until years later when it’s on Netflix.)
The movie is tragic, funny, dark, silly, thrilling, and grotesquely violent all at the exact same time. It’s a work I will always be insanely proud of. If you haven’t seen it yet, put down this stupid book and go watch it already.
BACKSTROM
Let’s skip ahead to the spring of 2013. The Office is just ending and my agents call about a script I should read. A movie script, I ask? No. Television, they reply. You’re kidding me, I say. You realize you’re calling me as I’m finishing my two hundredth episode of a TV show. The LAST thing I want in my life right now is another TV show. “Wait wait wait,” they say. “Just read it. Trust us. It’s an amazing script. The best of the whole of pilot season. Just read it.”
And so I did. The author was Hart Hanson, creator of the hit “crimedy” Bones. It truly was expertly written and mesmerizing. The character of Backstrom was funny, sad, infuriating, and filled with many increasing levels of complexity. I had never read an antihero like him before. And best of all? It was written specifically for a large, ungainly, offbeat, tortured actor like myself. I got Holiday and other friends to read it, and after a few truly difficult days of hemming and hawing, I decide to do the pilot.
After a half-day session with the great acting coach Larry Moss, I’m up in Vancouver two weeks after wrapping The Office, starting a new TV show. Cray cray.
Everyone had warned me about playing the single lead of a single-camera one-hour show, but Backstrom was beyond hard. In fact, I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Thirteen- to fourteen-hour days on little sleep and seven or eight pages to memorize a day. But I loved it. The cast and crew were exceptional and I was happy to be filming in the great Pacific Northwest again.