“The Office” actor Rainn Wilson spoke candidly about his upbringing, saying some of the more difficult aspects of his childhood may have led him to comedy.
The 57-year-old actor, who played fan favorite character Dwight Schrute on the NBC comedy series, shared details about his past on Steven Bartlett’s “The Diary of A CEO” podcast during the August 28 episode.
“’I experienced a lot of pain in my life, and a lot of suffering with anxiety and depression and addiction. As I dove into recovery and the therapeutic process, I can pin that squarely on a lot of gross imbalances and trauma that I suffered as a child,” Wilson said.
The actor said his mother “took off” when he was 2. He and his father moved to the “jungles of Nicaragua” before settling in Washington state, where he said he was subjected to “lots of different kinds of abuse.”
“Abandoned toddler, that’ll f*** you up, and there was this weird gaslighting mind f***,” Wilson said.
Wilson said he eventually pursued acting because he sought “acceptance” that he couldn’t find at home.
“There’s a reason why so many comedians come from painful backgrounds because comedy is what you plug in to shift your perspective away from pain and trauma just like gratitude takes you away from depression,” he explained. “You see the great comedians of the age and how much suffering they went through in their lives, but comedy became the necessary thing to plug into their perspective in order to carry forward.”
The actor said he’s ultimately “grateful” for the challenges in his life.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP
“This is the curious thing, I’m grateful for it, because if I had a happy, well-balanced childhood, I don’t know what my career would have been,” Wilson continued. “It certainly wouldn’t have been a successful actor.”
He said, “These confluences of pain and difficulty and abuse and neglect, they caused me a lot of suffering later on but at the same time they caused me to be driven and the best version of myself… they made me funny.”
Wilson also discussed how he wasn’t content following his rise to fame on “The Office.”
“There were times that I really struggled and I really wasn’t happy because it wasn’t enough,” he said on the podcast. He called the show the “greatest job” but said he “spent a lot of unnecessary time in anxious discontent when I should have been enjoying it.”
“It didn’t make any sense because society had told me that once you achieve all these things, you will be happy and it’s bullsh**.”
