An 'Office' worker takes to rock

As Dwight Schrute on

The Office

, Rainn Wilson is a walking sight gag with his thrift-shop clothes, chipped-kitchen-table haircut, and frowning face.

But wait until you see him with heavy-metal hair and mascara in The Rocker, a comic film opening Wednesday. As Fish, a rock drummer trying to make an unlikely comeback, Wilson looks like a shaggier and sweatier version of the drum-pounding Animal on The Muppet Show.

Actually you get to see far more of Wilson than you might have bargained for in The Rocker. Unwittingly, Fish becomes a YouTube sensation as the Naked Drummer.

"My body has been making people laugh since I was a teenager," Wilson says over lunch during a promotional visit to Philadelphia. "Might as well get paid for it."

Wilson, 42, used YouTube's resources himself to study the technique of headbanging drummers from the '80s like Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard's Rick Allen.

"It was a golden era," he says of the Reagan years. "I hated the music but, looking back on it, rock-and-roll was fun back then. All those songs about 'I wanna rock' and 'Long live rock' and 'We who are about to rock.' There's no poetry to it, no pretension to artistry. Just the act of rockin'. "

Did playing the role change his opinion of percussionists? "Yeah, I gained even less respect for them than I had previously," he says. "The musicians are in the front making music. The drummer sits behind them and bangs on things like a baboon."

Because there are many moving parts, filming performance scenes is a time-consuming process, usually entailing take after take. The process can really wear you out when you're spending the entire time whaling away like a madman on the skins.

"When you've been drumming all night long and it's 8:30 in the morning and you've been shooting since 4:30 p.m. the day before," he says, "it's so exhausting."

The degree of difficulty only increases, one would imagine, without clothes. "It requires very close supervision," says Wilson. "It's very sticky on the throne, as they call it."

The actor clarifies that, despite appearances, he wasn't nude.

"I had this little satchel around my privates," he explains. "They call it a modesty pouch. It has a little drawstring. It's remarkably similar to the pouch I used to carry my multisided Dungeons and Dragons dice."

Yes, Wilson spent his formative years in Seattle as a confirmed nerd, which may explain why he's able to portray unhinged outsiders like Dwight and Six Feet Under's creepy Arthur Martin so convincingly.

"I was every kind of geek," he allows. "And one geek that I think gets short shrift is the comedy geek. I was the kind of kid who would sit with a tape recorder in front of the TV for the Monty Pythons that would play at midnight on Sundays on PBS, recording on a cassette. I'd listen to it over and over again, memorizing all the songs and sketches."

Someone named Rainn is unlikely to have a smooth path through adolescence.

"My parents were bohemian hippie types who lived on a houseboat in Seattle in the '60s," he explains. "My mom wanted to name me Thucydides after the Greek historian. My dad wanted to name me Rainer after the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. My middle name is Dietrich after Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the opera singer. Somehow or other it ended up being Rainn with two n's. Go figure.

"It sucked when I was in junior high school and getting made fun of and slapped around a little bit," Wilson says. "But it's worked out pretty well in my professional life. It's a name people remember."

After a frustrating start as a stage actor in New York, Wilson's career has taken off in recent years, culminating with The Rocker, his first starring role.

He got the part through the usual hand-me-down channels.

"Basically what happens with every comedy script in Hollywood is it's shipped off to Will Ferrell and Jack Black and Ben Stiller," he says. "If they all pass, the studio goes, 'OK, now what the [expletive] do we do with this?'

"My name was on a list of five people the studio would consider to do the movie with," he says. "I met with the producers and really responded to it. I love the physical comedy and the silliness of it. And the rock-and-roll.

"But I also love the fact that in this time of very dark R-rated comedies, it's a sweet movie with an almost John Hughes feel, a curiously old-fashioned feel-good comedy."

Somewhat surprisingly for such a gonzo comedian, Wilson is a committed adherent of the Bahá'í faith, which holds that there is only one religion and only one God and that holy figures like Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Christ and Muhammad are all prophets of God's will for us.

"It's my spiritual life and my spiritual journey," says Wilson, who has launched a Web site, SoulPancake.com, designed for young people to express their ideas about spirituality and God and religion.

Even with that devotional grounding, Wilson is able to infuse his most famous creation, Dwight Schrute, with an almost eerie (if ineffectual) menace.

"Rainn brings an intensity to whatever he does that makes Dwight ring like a smartly tapped bell," says Greg Daniels, the executive producer of The Office, in an e-mail. "And for Dwight he combines a number of traits from classic nerds to rural types into something that is pretty unique."

Wilson didn't quite realize how attached the public had grown to this cracked beet-farmer and paper salesman from Scranton until the actor began traveling around the country to promote The Rocker.

"No one comes up and says, 'Nice work, buddy.' They're all, 'You don't understand! You don't understand!' " says Wilson, with rabid emphasis. "You wouldn't believe the number of times I get the phrase 'You don't understand!' I tell them, 'No, I get it. I do. You really, really love Dwight.' "

He isn't quite certain how to explain Dwight's appeal, but he thinks it has to do with the depths of his nuttiness.

"People in Hollywood always talk about 'likability.' I kind of feel that's bull," says Wilson. "I think if you make a character specific, really make him live and breathe, people will get on board, likability or not.

"If you can see the character's heart in some way, even as warped as Dwight Schrute's is, they will get on the train. And millions have gotten on the Dwight Train."

And why not? He's a guy who marches to the beat of his own drummer.

Naked or otherwise.