Rainn Wilson, best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office, in recent years has become a mental health and spirituality advocate through his books and production company, SoulPancake. On a brand new episode of The Great Creators with Guy Raz, he joins Guy to talk about the deep anxiety he faced as a young actor, his ensuing search for inner peace, and why he believes performing can be a spiritual act.
Exploring a rather scarring time in his life as a young actor, Rainn opened up about receiving poor reviews for his first play on Broadway, we might add, he admittedly noted was due to pressure and nerves. The actor shared that after his time in the play came to an end he had truly had enough. However he does attribute the experience to helping him snag his star-making gig on The Office.
“When it ended I was like enough, enough of that… I was like I’m never doing that again. I’m not gonna feel that kind of pressure to perform, to conform to some idea of me and like the pressure to like succeed and what people think they need to see in me… I’m going to embrace my inner weirdo… I really was done with that whole phase, and really truly feel like I would not have gotten Dwight Shrute and I would not have brought him to life, in the way that I did, had I not gone through that horrific, painful, excruciating experience of bombing on Broadway.”
As Guy pointed out, “your twenties are hard, because you’re supposedly an adult and there are expectations and you have expectations.” Noting that Rainn has previously talked about that period in his life as a time of “internal crisis, depression, anxiety, panic attacks,” Guy asked him to further elaborate on what was going on in his life at that time “that was triggering those things.”
“I have an anxiety disorder that manifests in a lot of different ways, and I spent a lot of my twenties trying to medicate it, y’know with drugs and alcohol. And that didn’t work out so well, and I’ve tried to medicate it with porn and with eating and with gambling, and y’know all kinds of ways. Even workaholism… I’ve went through depressive periods and wrestled with addiction and there were some very dark and troubling times in my twenties and thirties… and I still have to do daily kind of maintenance, I guess you would call it, on my anxiety. And at the same time I am also grateful for what I went through and have been through because it has kind of steered me to dig deeper on a spiritual path, on a path of wellness and wellbeing.”
Relating the way he feels about his journey to one of his favorite quotes from author of The Artists Way, Julia Cameron, which Rainn recited from memory, “She said, ‘I came to spirituality not out of virtue, but out of necessity,’ and that’s exactly how I feel.”
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