In an interview on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute in the TV series The Office, said the following:
When I signed up for The Office, it’s like, “I want to buy a house.” I wasn’t thinking about giving laughter as a therapeutic remedy and a balm and a salve to a hurting populace … I spent several years really mostly unhappy because it wasn’t enough.
This is what I was looking at: I’m on a hit show, Emmy nominated every year, making lots of money working with Steve Carell, and Jenna Fisher, and John Krasinski … I’m on one of the great TV shows. People love it. I wasn’t enjoying it. I was thinking about, “Why am I not a movie star? Why am I not the next Jack Black or the next Will Ferrell? How come I can’t have a movie career?” (He explained later in the interview how he couldn’t stop chasing the dragon that is success.)
When I was on The Office, I was making hundreds of thousands. I wanted millions. I was a TV star, but I wanted to be a movie star. It was never enough. Humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and never enough has helped us as a species.
