Rainn Wilson has been making audiences laugh and cry for a while now. After all, who can forget Dwight Schrute from The Office? The 58-year-old actor played the character for nine years and was nominated for the Emmys thrice, being one of the beloved characters from the series. Wilson co-wrote the New York Times bestsellers – SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions and The Bassoon King in 2015, and also founded the website and YouTube channel SoulPancake in 2019.
His latest New York Times Bestseller is titled Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, which came out in 2023. As the actor says, all these ventures of his are about creating a space that sparks conversations about spirituality.
Rainn Wilson Was Deeply Unhappy With His Career
Rainn Wilson has been working in the industry for decades. But he found himself unhappy with his life and career for quite some time, even during his most successful career stint while working on The Office. This made way for SoulPancake as well as his other spiritual ventures.
Wilson told Variety,
“My journey tiptoeing into the world of spirituality in media really came from some mental health crises that I had undergone as a youth and some issues that I’d had where I found great solace and peace and meaning through spirituality. I felt like culturally we weren’t exploring them, and SoulPancake was really the first of its kind. It was a positive, uplifting media company for young people that explored the human condition.”
Even when things were supposed to go his way, and he should have been living the dream, he was not satisfied. At least not in his core. According to the actor, he was on a “hedonic treadmill” trying to figure out how to achieve more success.
The Office Star Rainn Wilson – A Spiritual Activist
Rainn Wilson’s spirituality does not only extend to his search for peace and finding the meaning of life but also to his work. The actor has been a long-time climate activist, so much so that he changed his name from Rainn Percival Dietrich Wilson to Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson. Using the Arctic Risk Name Generator website, the actor took a step to bring attention to climate change issues we are facing as a human race. In a statement on X (via NBC News), Wilson said,
“I’m hoping this name change brings attention to this growing… er, melting issue. We need world leaders at COP27 to take notice and take action. The Arctic is melting at millions of litres per second, yet this problem can’t seem to make a name for itself, so it’s up to us to make a name for it.”
The actor also produced and starred in a five-part documentary, Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss, where he travels around the world, trying to find the happiest as well as the least happy places on Earth. The documentary is available on Prime Video.
