Rainn Wilson built one of the most beloved characters in television history playing Dwight Schrute on The Office. Now he’s saying that show could never get made in today’s climate.
His Hollywood friends aren’t exactly thrilled about it.
And what Wilson told Fox News Digital about cancel culture, woke comedy, and his liberal friends’ reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination is turning heads in Washington, DC and beyond.
The Show That Made America Laugh — and Why It’s Gone Forever
The Office ran nine seasons on NBC from 2005 to 2013. It became one of the most-streamed shows in American television history, drawing millions of viewers on Peacock years after the final episode aired. The characters were obnoxious, clueless, and often offensive — and that was the whole point.
Wilson sat down recently with Fox News Digital and didn’t mince words about what the woke mob has done to comedy.
“I do feel like you couldn’t make The Office today,” Wilson said. “I think that would be too hard to be as politically incorrect as the show was. And I do, I do kind of miss that.”
He went further. Wilson pointed out that both his character, Dwight Schrute, and Steve Carell’s Michael Scott were written as men without self-awareness — bumbling, insensitive, and oblivious. The joke was always on them. But even that fig leaf isn’t enough protection anymore.
“We milked that for a lot of great, really inappropriate stuff,” Wilson said. “But even with the fact that painting that character as just an idiot, I don’t think you could get away with it today.”
Wilson even cited the Benihana Christmas episode by name — the one where Michael and Andy draw a mark on an Asian woman at the Christmas party to tell her apart from another woman they’d brought back. “Listen, the Benihana Christmas episode where Michael and Andy draw with a sharpie on one of the Asian women that they’ve brought back to the Christmas party is jaw droppingly kind of horrific,” Wilson said. “And it’s a tricky conversation, you know? They’re clueless and in their cluelessness they’re racist and insensitive, and they’re always saying the wrong thing.”
He called the whole show “based around clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that kind of mirrors the United States in a lot of ways.” The writers knew exactly what they were doing. They built a comedy around the uglier corners of American office life and trusted audiences to understand the satire. Audiences got it. Critics got it. Everybody laughed.
The DEI crowd wasn’t around to kill it yet.
What Woke Hollywood Did to American Comedy
It’s worth pausing on what Wilson is actually saying. He isn’t some right-wing firebrand. He’s a practicing member of the Baha’i faith who was recently on Capitol Hill promoting a bipartisan letter on religious freedom and national unity. He’s not Tucker Carlson. He’s not a Trump voter going on Fox News to score political points.
And he’s still saying cancel culture murdered the kind of comedy that made The Office one of the most rewatchable shows ever produced.
That should tell you something about how far things have gone. When a left-leaning Hollywood actor shows up on Capitol Hill to talk about bridging partisan divides and still can’t help but admit that woke ideology has strangled American comedy, the problem is bigger than politics. The entertainment industry spent years telling ordinary Americans that their sense of humor was dangerous. They chased out the writers who could make you laugh at the uncomfortable parts of life, replaced them with writers who treat every episode like a public service announcement, and then acted surprised when nobody watched.
The Office, meanwhile, kept racking up streams. Go figure.
The Charlie Kirk Moment That Said Everything
Wilson’s comments on comedy landed hard enough. But the more revealing part of his recent public appearances came from something he said about his own friends.
After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025 at Utah Valley University during a stop on his American Comeback Tour, Wilson went public with what he heard from the people around him in Hollywood. He described the reaction on his “Soul Boom” podcast in a conversation with actor Mark Ruffalo.
“I spoke to a couple of — let’s say, liberal friends — at an event, and they were like, ‘You won’t find me shedding any tears,'” Wilson told Ruffalo. “It was a little bit of a good riddance thing, and it’s like, ‘Guys, NO!'”
He didn’t stop there. “We can’t kill people we disagree with,” Wilson said. “Even if we find them horrifically offensive. And we need to come to a deeper kind of spiritual healing that underlies something as basic as like, ‘Hey, we need to bring the temperature down.'”
Ruffalo, for his part, agreed that celebrating political violence was wrong. “There’s no idea that if we cheer on our opponents being hurt or harmed in any way, that we win as a society,” Ruffalo said. “And we all lose.”
Ruffalo also used the occasion to push for gun control — which is a separate argument worth having, but it’s telling that his first instinct after a political assassination was to talk about restricting the rights of law-abiding Americans rather than the rot inside his own political coalition.
Wilson deserves credit for not doing that. He pushed back on the casual cruelty he saw from his own side. In Hollywood, that takes real nerve.
The Partisan Hypocrisy Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Wilson traveled to Washington, DC recently to take part in the release of “A Common Endeavor: Realizing the Promise of America,” a five-part letter backed by leaders of the Baha’i faith, alongside Representatives Brendan Boyle (D-PA) and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL). The letter pushes for bridging political polarization and refocusing on shared American values ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
While he was there, Wilson got specific about partisan hypocrisy. He used Maine Democrat Senate nominee Graham Platner — who was caught with a tattoo recognized as a Nazi symbol — as an example of the left’s selective outrage problem.
“The political right is all up in arms about that ‘Oh, he’s a racist, see,'” Wilson explained. “But they won’t look at their own side when people show racist tendencies or say racist things. And it’s the same on the left. They’re willing to overlook the Platner Nazi tattoo, but if it was someone from the other side that had a tattoo that was questionable, they would be all over MSNBC about it.”
He’s right. The rules only apply when they’re useful. Democrats spent years demanding accountability for any Republican who said anything remotely offensive, then looked the other way when one of their own Senate candidates had a Nazi tattoo. The standard isn’t a standard. It’s a weapon.
“The partisan divide and toxic partisanship, and corruption in partisanship, is something that the American people are very passionate about,” Wilson said. “The people want this fixed. There is an outcry from people. They want it fixed.”
And there’s the spiritual dimension Wilson keeps returning to. “There’s not any topic that has more commonality and mutuality than spiritual ideas,” he said. “The ideas around spirituality have kind of been weaponized in terms of the national discussion, but actually the two sides have more in common than you would think.”
Whether that’s true or not is an open question. But Wilson at least believes it. And he’s willing to say things in public that most of his colleagues in Hollywood won’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
What This Actually Means
The bigger picture here isn’t really about The Office. The show is fine. It’s still streaming. People are still watching it. A spinoff called The Paper is currently in its second season, and Wilson has noted that one of its characters carries some of the same socially awkward, politically incorrect energy that defined the original.
But Wilson’s admission that you couldn’t make the original today is an indictment of what the left-wing cultural machine has done to American entertainment. The DEI bureaucrats, the sensitivity readers, the social media mobs who get writers fired for decade-old tweets — they didn’t just make comedy less funny. They made it less honest. They stripped out the characters who said the wrong thing and replaced them with characters who say exactly the right thing, every time, with the correct politics and the appropriate amount of self-awareness.
Nobody wants to watch that. And the ratings prove it.
Wilson is a complicated figure. He’s not a conservative. He supports causes that most readers here would disagree with. But on this particular set of questions — that cancel culture has killed comedy, that the left’s tolerance for political violence against conservatives is genuinely dangerous, that partisan hypocrisy is corroding the country — he’s saying things that are true. And he’s saying them out loud in Hollywood, which still takes guts.
The American people are exhausted by the woke left telling them what they can laugh at, what they can say, and which political murders are worth mourning. Wilson seems to understand that. His friends in Hollywood, by and large, do not.
Sources: Fox News Digital, Breitbart, Whiskey Riff, The Daily Bo Snerdley, Hollywood in Toto, Variety, FāVS News