Actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute on The Office, has claimed that his iconic show would not be possible today due to cancel culture and political divisions.
Wilson told Fox News over the weekend that The Office would likely face an uphill battle in this current political climate, adding that show would need to jettison some of its politically incorrect jokes.
“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.”
While Wilson appreciated how the show poked fun at both his character and Steve Carell’s, he felt that would not be enough to assuage audiences on the more “inappropriate stuff.”
“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.”
The actor then pontificated on America’s political divisions, blaming it on a refusal by both Democrats and Republicans to regulate craziness on their own side. He called for a spiritual renewal for people to find commonalities.
“There’s not any topic that has more commonality and mutuality than spiritual ideas,” Wilson 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.”
“The partisan divide and toxic partisanship, and corruption in partisanship, is something that the American people are very passionate about,” Wilson later added. “The people want this fixed. There is an outcry from people. They want it fixed.”
Following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in 2025, Wilson lamented the callousness he saw among his more left-leaning friends.
“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.’”
“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,’” added Wilson. “It was a little bit of a good riddance thing, and it’s like, ‘Guys, NO!’”
Actor Mark Ruffalo, an outspoken progressive, agreed with Rainn Wilson in the same interview.
“I’m someone whose brother was murdered, I lost my brother to gun violence,” Ruffalo said. “And so, this is a real personal topic with me. It’s no winning. We’ll never win this way. There’s no idea that if we cheer on our opponents being hurt or harmed in any way, that we win as a society. And we all lose.”
“I know what his family is going through” Ruffalo continued. “Like, I understand that on such a personal level. And it’s a tragedy that not only the person who is killed experiences, but the entire family and community around that person.”