Rainn Wilson Auditioned to Play Michael Scott

Rainn Wilson went into his audition for The Office wanting to play Michael Scott. He read for it as an impersonation of Ricky Gervais, which is the wrong instinct for an American remake and he knew it. He has said since that he had an affinity for the other part.

He got the other part. It produced three consecutive Emmy nominations for supporting actor, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and it turned out to be the role the show could not run without.

The English original

Dwight descends from Gareth Keenan, played by Mackenzie Crook in the British series. The bones are the same. A middle manager's enforcer with a military fixation and no read on the room whatsoever.

What Wilson changed was the direction of the ambition. Gareth is a sneak, working angles against colleagues who barely register him. Dwight is an authoritarian, and his loyalty runs upward with total sincerity. That single adjustment is why the American character could carry nine seasons while the original was built to last twelve episodes. A sneak has one joke. A true believer has an inexhaustible supply.

The persistent claim that Dwight was based on a real paper salesman traces to costume designer Carey Bennett, who visited an actual paper company before the first season and remembered an employee wearing a wolf T-shirt. That was wardrobe research, and it produced Dwight's own wolf shirt years later. Nobody who wrote or played him has claimed more than that.

Assistant to the regional manager

The running gag about the preposition is the whole character in one word. Dwight is not assistant regional manager. He is assistant to the regional manager, a title that means nothing, and he corrects you every time because to him the distinction is real and load-bearing.

Nobody defends a meaningless title unless they need it to be meaningful. The joke is not that he is stupid. The joke is that the hierarchy he is defending does not exist, and he is the only one guarding it.

The competence is not a bit

Here is what most sitcoms would not bother with. Dwight is actually good at things. Top salesman at the branch, consistently, for years. He runs a working beet farm and turns it into a bed and breakfast, an idea Paul Lieberstein got from staying at one in Italy. By the seventh season he owns the business park Dunder Mifflin rents its office inside, so the company employing him is paying rent to him.

The bed and breakfast worked well enough that TripAdvisor built Schrute Farms a real listing in the autumn of 2007, timed to the episode. It passed six hundred reviews by early 2010 and a thousand by 2014, all of them written about a stay nobody took at a farm that does not exist. TripAdvisor left it up, badged as fictional, on the grounds that it was a bit of fun.

The promotion he did not get

When Steve Carell left after the seventh season, the writers' room wanted Dwight to take the branch. The character had been building toward it for seven years and the show's own logic pointed straight at it.

The network overruled them and gave the job to Andy Bernard, because Ed Helms had just been in The Hangover and was the more commercially useful name. The most qualified, most committed, longest-serving person in the building was passed over for someone with better outside prospects.

That is the joke the show had been telling about Dwight for seven years, executed on the actor by the network, in real life, apparently without anyone noticing the rhyme.

Why he ends up on a shirt

The Dwight Schrute tee puts him in the glasses, shirt and suspenders, staring dead ahead, with the beet rows and the barn behind him. The farm is the right background. It is the part of his life where the seriousness actually pays off, and it is the part the office never sees.

The name has since escaped into business writing as shorthand for the difficult colleague who improves a team's decisions by refusing to agree with it. The Globe and Mail ran a piece in 2009 titled Why every office needs a Dwight Schrute.

Everybody has worked with one. Some of us have been one. The uncomfortable part is that he is usually right, and it usually does not help him.

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