Rainn Wilson’s new comedy, The Rocker, follows the exploits of Robert “Fish” Fishman, a drummer for the ’80s hair metal band Vesuvius. The film opens to find the group kicking Fish out of the band, just as they’re about to sign their first big record contract and become massively popular — leaving Fish to spend years working soul-crushing day jobs, and brooding about what could have been. Fish gets an improbable second chance at stardom, however, when his teenage cousin asks him to drum for his band during a gig at the high school prom, and the oddly matched group decide to make a go of it. In honor of The Rocker’s release, Wilson recently sat down for a roundtable interview with a handful of critics for a freewheeling Q&A about geek-cool, religion, and the upside of a rock star diet.

Q: What real rockers did you lift from for inspiration?

Rainn Wilson: No specific ones, just spent a lot of time on YouTube. For heavy metal drummers, it’s a great resource.

Q: What was your extensive workout regimen to get in shape for The Rocker?

RW: I would do sets of sit-ups; I would do six sets of two sit-ups; a cigarette in between. I was on the In-N-Out burger diet, and that’s about it. Pretty pathetic isn’t it? That was the extent of it.

Q: It’s a luxury. It’s the Will Ferrell exercise routine. You do a movie where you’re supposed to be flabby and you go easy on it. You don’t have to buff up.

RW: Absolutely. I will show my body to get a laugh at any time. If I knew I’d get a laugh right now I’d take my clothes off, but I think I would freak you guys out.

Q: That’s the beauty of comedy. Christian Bale’s gotta live on two grains of rice a week, run up a mountain every day, and you get to hang out and do whatever you want.

RW: That’s right.

Q: What I liked about the movie is you had a parallel with Pete Best, the drummer for The Beatles who was ousted before they got huge. Can you comment on having him in the movie, and getting to work with him?

RW: One of the producers knew his cousin, so we flew him in and shot a little scene that got cut from the movie - which I think is ironic that he flew in for this movie and his scene got cut just like his drumming got cut. He was the man at the bus stop reading the Rolling Stone magazine. I got to interview him, and hang out with him, and he’s such a nice guy and a sweetheart. He has a great sense of humor, and really (is) at peace with the whole thing.

Q: He’s gonna outlive them.

RW: He probably will. He said quite candidly, “Look, you never know what the best course is in life. I have six grandkids, and I tour with my band when I want.” I think the unspoken thing is that he gets a bunch of Beatles residuals from early Beatles tracks that he played on – early BBC recordings that came out.

Q: Even that’s enough to live on.

RW: Sure it is. It was really cool to interview someone that was part of music history - kind of for what they didn’t do - but still fascinating.

Q: How is it to be in a fake band with Will Arnett? Is there enough air in the room at the end of the day?

RW: He was perfect. There’s no one better to play a preening egomaniac than Will Arnett – and I say that with all love.

Q: Teddy Geiger [Rocker Costar] says all you guys learned how to play instruments. I know you did bassoon and clarinet early on.

RW: I was a total band geek - recorder, clarinet, tenor sax. I was convinced by my band teacher, and for some reason I allowed him to switch me to bassoon. I spent four or five years playing bassoon. I even played xylophone for a while.

Q: You guys could actually perform a live concert if you wanted to?

RW: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know about the fat kid (Laughter). He’d have trouble, but I imagine if there were some easy chords he could do it.

Q: What was it like working with Christina Applegate?

RW: Terrible. Next question. (Laughter) She couldn’t have been cooler. There’s a woman who has it all - smart as a whip, really sexy, great sense of humor, and just a lot of fun to hang around with. She’s fantastic.

Q: Did you keep any of your costumes?

RW: Yes, I have the red leather pants and these cowboy boots (pointing to his footwear in the movie’s poster). And actually, the blue cowboy shirt that I wear in part of it was my personal shirt, and it’s been in two other movies – Sahara and BADASSSSS!

Q: Do you feel that you’ve now reaped the benefits of the geek ascendancy? The geek is now in.

RW: Yeah, I rode that geek wave. I think I helped spearhead that whole geekness being cool. I was picked as People magazine’s sexy geek of the year - one of the fifty sexiest people, geek sexy or something like that. Yes, it is the age of the geek. We know that they control finance, commerce, computers, show business, music even nowadays. It’s a very different world than when I was going to high school in the early ‘80s, and the geeks were shoved into lockers, and it was the idiot, long-haired jocks that ruled the universe.

Q: Well look at them now.

RW: They’re all serving Slurpees.

Q: You’re going to jump to a different geek plateau when you do Transformers.

RW: Yes. I did a day on Transformers. I’ve already shot it; it’s just a cameo as a college professor.

Q: How do you choose your roles? You always seem to play these quirky characters off the beaten path.

RW: Well you know I really want to play against my type. (Laughter). So I look a certain way, and I really want to play characters that go against that.

Q: Are you feeling comfortable in the leading man role? Are you ready to seize the leading man spotlight?

RW: I’m going to seize the leading man balls. (Laughter). Yeah, it was an adjustment. I’d always played supporting characters that are responding in opposition to other characters - in response to what other characters are doing. It’s my wants and needs that propel the movie forward - it was definitely a shift, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I think, hopefully, there will be other leads in my future whether people see The Rocker or not.

Q: What’s going to happen to Dwight on season 5 of The Office?

RW: I have no idea. I haven’t read any of the scripts yet; I haven’t even talked to them about it. And, if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you, but I don’t know.

Q: What attracted you to the part of Dwight?

RW: I was a big fan of the English show. I thought the script was funny, and I thought it had a ton of potential to reach a mass American audience. I knew that kind of character was right in my wheelhouse; that particular kind of militant nerd. I know that was something that I could play that no one else could come close to. So I knew I had to have that, a shot at that.

Q: How much lead time do you get on scripts?

RW: That week. We do a read-through on Thursday, and we’re shooting Monday. We’re pretty good at keeping them under lock and key there. Nobody wants to let anything out. People have all kinds of ways of trying to get information. They’ll take audition sides, and post them online, so they started creating fake audition sides. They wrote a fake Jim and Pam marriage scene with a weird priest, and they started sending that out, and people were like, “Oh my God, Pam and Jim are getting married and there’s like a weird priest in it!”

Q: Have you ever been tripped up playing a character with as rich a history as Dwight? A situation where you have a history for him in your mind, and then the writers come up with something new about his history that has completely thrown you off from how you’ve played him?

RW: You know I don’t really work on Dwight’s history. Like, I don’t even know what his status is with his mother or father; I haven’t even worked that out. There’s no kind of method there. He’s got a cousin, and I remember in the middle of the second season when all of a sudden he says, “Look, I’ve got a forty acre beet farm. And sometimes kids come on and use it for sex.” And it’s like I had no idea I had a beet farm, but somehow it made more sense for the character. Like, of course he’s a farmer working in an office. That makes total sense of why there’s a disconnect, because farmers are a little bit weird in society. They spend so much time with the soil, then they come in and are trying to interact, and can’t quite fit in.

Q: Do you have a hard time forgetting to ignore the camera after shooting The Office for so long?

RW: On Transformers, I kept looking at the camera. I shot it a couple of weeks ago - it was right after the Office - it was the first thing I shot. There would be talking, and I’d just kind of catch the camera, and it would be like, “What am I doing?” We had to stop and start again. I picture Michael Bay looking at the dailies going, “What the fuck is that guy doing looking into the camera lens? The number one thing they teach you, don’t ever look at the camera.”

Q: Your dad is a painter, right?

RW: Yeah my Dad did a lot of abstract painting. Not terribly successful but we have a website, rrwilsonart.com, that we sell some works that he’s purchased over the years, and we also represent a few artists up there as well.

Q: Is that something you like doing with your father?

RW: Yeah, It’s something we share; it’s something we both have a great love for, art - especially modern art, and abstract art - so we kind of carry that into the website. I’m also starting another website called Soul Pancake. It’s going to be for spirituality and creativity - where they meet. Because basically anything having to do with God, or spirituality, is such a dirty word. It’s either Christian Fundamentalist, or else it’s like airy fairy hippy-dippy bullshit. So, having a website that allows an expression of God or spirituality through the arts that isn’t either one of those things - that’s kind of cool. That’s what we’re shooting for.

Q: Can you comment on the runaway success of Juno? I know you only had a bit part in it, but nevertheless it was very memorable. Were you amazed that it was so successful?

RW: I was really amazed. You do a lot of parts in movies – I was in Sahara and Super Ex-Girlfriend and The Last Mimzy – movies that no one saw, and I think each of those movies was good in ways for what that were trying to do; I don’t think any of them are total stinkers, but more people have seen my one day shoot on Juno. It’s amazing, I’ll run into kids who don’t even know me from The Office, but they know me from Juno.

Q: You had some very memorable dialogue in that movie. A lot of Junospeak.

RW: I remember it getting a lot of shit online from people like, “Rainn Wilson sucks! It’s so unbelievable.” And it’s like, “Dude, you try saying ‘that’s one doodle that can’t be undid home skillet’,” in a believable way. That’s all I was trying to do was just make those lines sound vaguely human. You have to look at what you’re asked to do. It’s like Dwight, it’s the same thing. People say it’s so over the top, or so unbelievable, but I’ve been asked to vomit on a car, jump off of a roof, carry someone from a fire. I’m just fulfilling the obligations of what’s written for me.