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Enlarge By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY Drumming up interest: Rainn Wilson plays the drum set he uses in The Rocker, out Wednesday, in his garage in Agoura Hills, Calif. The Office star took lessons before the movie started shooting. ON THE ROAD TO FAMOUS
Look for Wilson next year in:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
This continuation to last summer’s shape-shifting alien-robot blockbuster is still shooting, and the plot is hush-hush. “I just did a little cameo,” Wilson says. “I was a big fan of the original, and this was a hoot. I play a college professor. I wish I had something more interesting to say, that some robot that attacks me, or that I blow up in some interesting, fantastical way, but it’s nothing like that.” Wilson jokes that he may just start telling people: “I play Optimus Prime.”
Bonzai Shadowhands
Still in the script phase, Wilson would play a depressed, alcoholic loser trying to rebuild his life with the help of a young kid. Oh, and he’s a former ninja. Oscar-nominated Juno director Reitman plans to direct. “It’s a tough movie for me to describe to people because it’s a ninja comedy, and people immediately think about that Chris Farley movie (Beverly Hills Ninja), but it’s not,” Reitman says. “The tone is Midnight Cowboy,” he says, describing a story of heartbreak, loneliness and professional dissatisfaction — Death of a Salesman, solely instead of a mundane job, the guy’s a ninja. “It’s ‘Death of a Ninja’!” Reitman says.
SUMMER MOVIE GUIDE By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY AGOURA HILLS, Calif. — Rainn Wilson is not America’s sweetheart.
Think of him instead as America’s spleen-venter — releasing mistrust and anger through comedy.
PHOTOS: Blink and you may miss Rainn in some other roles VIDEO: Check out Wilson’s drumming skills
He has cornered the market on schemers, revenge-seekers, windbags and hasslers, the characters everyone likes in fiction because no one likes them in reality.
From the impulsive power his awkward, cubicle-based authoritarian Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The Office peaceably plotted revenge against prankster co-workers over a stapler they embedded in Jell-O, a misanthropic star was born.
Nonetheless, Wilson has made a pact.
“No more creepy, nerdy weirdos,” the actor says. “I play one on a TV show and have played them before, and people have seen me as that. Frankly, I can do a lot more and different stuff. I don’t want to limit myself.”
For now, though, creepy, wild weirdos are still an option.
That’s who Wilson plays in The Rocker, opening Wednesday, about a sloppy, crazed drummer, embittered over a missed chance to make it big with an ’80s heavy-metal band, who now plans to destroy anything in his path to reclaim former glory.
Wilson plays Robert “Fish” Fishman, a Cleveland loser whose dreams — of the same kind with well as his clothes and mullet hairstyle — are 20 years out of fashion. As Vesuvius, the group that unceremoniously dumped him, prepares for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he joins his teenage nephew’s garage band and hijacks its early success.
The Rocker is the first starring movie role during Wilson, 42, who has get one of TV and film’s most reliable scene-stealers.
Consider Dwight’s boastfulness when he describes himself as assistant regional manager, only to be deflated by Michael Scott (Steve Carell) correcting him: He’s assistant to the regional manager. And his hyper-aggressive Rollo the convenience store clerk in Juno.
The obnoxious and unusual has really worked for him.
“There is always this fear in Hollywood that, ‘Oh, characters poverty to be likable and relatable.’ And I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. I think that characters need to be human and they need to be recognizable, but they don’t have to necessarily be likable,” he says. “That opens a whole world of comic possibilities. I enjoy playing essentially unlikable characters and really committing to it and digging in.”
Not only has Dwight earned him two Emmy nominations, including one for this year’s ceremony, but it also has struck a nerve with fans — affair even Wilson didn’t expect.
“The one thing that really amazed me about Dwight was that people love him. He’s so obnoxious, he’s mean and petty, but people are gaga for him as a character. They feel for him and adore him, and it’s just because it’s well-written and a specific characterization. It’s real.”
When Wilson meets fans, he hears a common refrain. “Everyone says, ‘We have a Dwight in our office.’ Everyone says that … which is pretty astonishing. Dwight is an Amish beet farmer, paper salesman with militant fascistic tendencies,” Wilson says, breaking into a huge, sarcastic smile. “But everyone feels they have a Dwight in their office.”
His confess beat
At Wilson’s home in the dry, rural slopes of Agoura Hills, just northwest of Los Angeles (”Great … Are you going to give out my address, too?” he jokes), the actor sits down at a drum contrive in his garage and demonstrates the rhythmic prowess he learned for The Rocker. The bass drum begins its thunderous pulse, and Wilson bobs his head in the manner that he keeps a steady beat. At the end, he unleashes a machine-gun-style attack across the snare and tom drums, back and forth, before the requisite cymbal crash.
It’s … OK.
“I’m not really, uh, a drummer,” Wilson concedes, laughing.
Wilson learned to fake it after several weeks of lessons before The Rocker was shot. He jokes that his inspiration was not Tommy Lee, Keith Moon and John Bonham, but Animal from The Muppets. “Animal is the essential part of calm drumming,” Wilson says.
A friend whom Wilson credits for “discovering” him says the seemingly cerebral actor has always been in touch with his out-of-control tendencies.
“My first real dealing with Rainn was a rehearsal session at my house that we had for House of 1000 Corpses,” says rock star and movie director Rob Zombie, who cast Wilson as a victim who gets butchered by a family of freaks. “Within 15 minutes, Rainn took off all his clothes and was diving into the swimming pool. Total rock-star behavior. He’s a rocker at heart.”
Emma Stone, 19, who co-stars in The Rocker as the band’s bass player (but is best known as the unattainable redhead in Superbad), says Wilson is pleasantly unpredictable. “He can be touching and dramatic or off-the-wall and jolly, depending on the situation,” she says. “He’s whatever he needs to be. He is a demi-god that has come to Earth to grace us with his multiple talents, which include comedy, unfiltered sarcasm and the ability to retain his dignity while riding a tricycle into a pool” (for a scene in the movie that illustrates his partying excess).
Close to home
There’s no out-of-control behavior during the pay a visit to to Wilson’s house. No pool, either, just horses in the backyard, where his wife, author Holiday Reinhorn, is out for a midday ride.
His living room shelves are lined with books on philosophy, history and faith, and the walls are adorned with folk trade and modern abstract paintings from artists he helps represent in a fine-art dealership business with his father, Robert.
But there’s very little, if any, snobbery in him.
In the garage, where he plays poker, there’s a painting of dogs doing the same. And Wilson is prone to pronouncements such as: “Want to read great literature? Slash’s autobiography.”
Drawings and cut-outs by 3-year-old son Walter adorn the wall over the dining room table, and when the child shyly enters the living room during the interview, Wilson challenges him to a duel. “Show me your karate. Show me your karate punch, OK? Kee-yah!” the elder Wilson says, and the boy shrinks into a ball.
Meanwhile, The Rocker is the actor’s chance to show what he can do. As much as he’d like to try event a whole world away from Dwight, Wilson says the realities of the movie business require him, for now, to stick somewhat close to the role he has established.
“What separates them is that Dwight is very tightly wound, and I think Fish is very loosely wound,” Wilson says. “Dwight may not be the brightest bulb, but he’s very exacting and rigorous, and there is a kind of philosophy that guides everything he does. In that way he’s very thoughtful. And Fish is completely thoughtless, really. Fish lets it all hang out, and is loose, and just wants to be a rock ‘n’ roller,” he says. “Dwight just wants to have existence Mussolini.”
The Office is also sophisticated, subtle comedy, while The Rocker is PG-13 and aimed little higher than the adolescent age group.
The movie “is not profound. We’re not dealing with Citizen Kane here, but it’s nice to have a story that has some heart to it,” Wilson says. “It’s this movie about a guy with these kids, but he’s the one who needs to come of age.”
Meanwhile, he has plans for something radically different.
“A couple irons I have in the fire have a little more darker edge to them,” he says. “My ideal movie to make is one I have actually written a second draft on, one I’ve been working upon the body with (Oscar-nominated Juno director) Jason Reitman called Bonzai Shadowhands, about a down-and-out alcoholic ninja,” he says. “It’s a very dark comedy, the most (messed)-up version of The Karate Kid you can imagine. That fits my sensibility well.”
An early start
Once they make that comedy, Reitman says, Wilson could do what a lot of comics be possible to’t: Make the crossover to drama.
“He knows to what extent to make anything real. That’s what you’re looking for in a comedy these days — a guy who can take an outlandish situation and make it in some degree honest and believable. He’s just a fantastic actor. While his technique has been used to make really funny TV and movies, what he hasn’t had the opportunity to do yet is conversion to an act that to simply move family in dramatic moments.”
Like a lot of performers, Wilson discovered acting in high school. His first play was something called Time Out conducive to Ginger. “Ginger tries out for the football team, and the whole team is up in arms. I was Ginger’s dad,” he recalls.
Doing the play after his father moved the family from Seattle to Chicago helped open up new social circles. “All of a sudden, girls started being interested in me,” he said. “I had the guide in the school play, and girls were like, ‘Heeeey, how are you?’ And I was like, “Goooood … how are you?’ The course was set at that point.”
Eventually, it paid off. He met his wife in New York when they were working in theater there during the early 1990s.
Fame and fortune took a lot longer. “I was playing the nurse’s assistant in a bus-and-truck touring production of Romeo and Juliet for a year and a half. That’s where I started. I was 23, merited gotten out of college at NYU. I worked my way up from in that place.”
He spent nearly 14 years in theater before making the leap to movies and TV.
“I had a lot of side jobs. I had some of the worst jobs. I did a part of catering and waiting tables. That’s pretty standard. But for a while I sold insurance. And I worked at the Multiple Sclerosis Society as an assistant special-events coordinator.”
Or was it assistant to the special events coordinator?
Wilson is momentarily derailed by the obvious joke he has set up, then laughs. “Very nice, same nice,” he says.
That sort of thing happens to him all the time, but rarely catches him off guard.
It’s even worse with “That’s what she said …,” the show’s lame answer to point out a common phrase that has a sexual double-entendre.
“Fans will come up to meet me and want me to say anything that will let them slip in a ‘That’s what she said …’ They’ll be like, ‘So do you like acting? And I’m like, ‘I like it.’ And they’ll say, ‘That’s what she said!’ They’ll error one in.”
The actor pauses a moment, then adds: “Uh … that’s what she said.”
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Enlarge Lucasfilm/Warner Bros. Pictures Student becomes teacher: Anakin Skywalker, right, takes without ceasing apprentice Ahsoka Tano, Star Wars’ first major female Jedi, in a new animated installment. SUMMER MOVIE GUIDE By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY The modern Star Wars movie may be less for Jabba than for Jabba’s baby.
Enlarge Overture Films Luke Wilson stars as the title character in Henry Poole Is Here. 
Enlarge Paramount Pictures Rolling to the top: Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder edged out The Dark Knight for the No. 1 spot more than the weekend. By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY The Dark Knight has finally fallen.
Enlarge Lucasfilm/Warner Bros. Pictures Ahsoka Tano engages in battle in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.