Question: How did your experiences growing
up in a sort of unconventional family inform who you are today?
Rainn Wilson: Well, I grew up a very dorky, weird looking kid in suburban Seattle and to
make matters worse another way in which I didn’t fit in was my parents were Baha’is, members of the
Baha’i faith, and I grew up a member of the Baha’i faith. And one of the great things about that was
that I had a very Catholic—from the original use of the word Catholic—view of religions. We soaked
in all kinds of different beliefs. Jehovah’s Witnesses would knock on the door. We would
invite them in and discuss the Bible with them. We would have Buddhist monks traveling through town
stay with us. We had books on Sufism and Sikhism and I knew about all of these things and I was
raised to think about philosophy and religious thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind
in a different way, also really socially progressive teachings of the Baha’i faith,
the equality of men and women, the elimination of racial prejudice, the equality of science
and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big ideas in my household. And we were weird and
unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a really positive thing that came out of it.
Then when I moved to New York in my 20s, I really abandoned all that—and so many people do that grow
up in religious households. They just abandon the way of their parents. I decided there couldn’t
be a God, that there was so much suffering in the world. Religion perpetrated so much evil.
I wanted to do my own way and take my own journey and what I did was I became an artist and I just
focused on being an actor and all of my attention just went to... and my kind of my fervor went to
theater and acting and I really thought with my friends that went to school down at NYU we would
do little basement productions of Hedda Gabler or whatever and we really thought we could change the
world. If we did the right piece of theater in the right way with the right audience we could
touch people’s hearts and we could just blow their minds and just open things up completely.
And I also focused on my career as an actor a great deal and I became very me-focused and
me-centered, just myself and my career and what is next and how do I get a better agent and how do I
get into TV and movies and then I you know I felt a yearning. I came to a crossroads. I hit bottom,
in a way. I was really unhappy, and realized that I just wanted something more about....
from the experience of being alive. I was like I was doing great plays. It wasn’t changing the
world. I was getting good agents and doing film and TV and I wasn’t happier. I was like "Wow,
there is an unease inside of me." And that led me back on my kind of more spiritual path to the
Baha’i faith in a new and fresher way and a more realized way and I came to also understand at
that point that there was no difference between being devout and being an artist. There is no
difference between creativity and spirituality and philosophy and that is what Soul Pancake,
the book, and SoulPancake.com are about is: it’s all about human expression and it’s all about
seeking to transcend. It’s about that yearning and whether it’s through science or through art,
through service, through worship it’s the human experience of longing to connect with people,
to connect with the energy throughout creation and we compartmentalize all of
these things and I realized it’s all the same thing. I play Dwight. That is just
much me being of service and worshiping as if I'm on my knees in some temple somewhere
or bowing my head in prayer to God in some way. It’s really all just the same thing.
Question: What keeps you up at night?
Rainn Wilson: Boy, I sleep like a log. I always have. I just I hit the pillow
and it’s like [snore sound]. What keeps my wife up at night is my horrific snoring,
which I got to get taken care of. I need to get those nose strips.