Rainn Wilson
Rainn Wilson talks to Zillow employees at the Zillow Speaker Series

Native Seattleite Rainn Wilson paid a visit to a packed house of Zillow employees today as part of their recurring Zillow Speaker Series, speaking on a wide range of topics, including his geeky upbringing in Seattle, his discovery of acting and his charitable work to support education in impoverished areas of the world.

Before he found fame as eccentric and geeky characters on Six Feet Under and The Office, Wilson grew up in Seattle, attending Shorecrest High School and the University of Washington. In addition to his current work on the show Backstrom, Wilson supports the Seattle-based Mona Foundation, a non-profit that supports grassroots educational initiatives worldwide. Below are some excerpts from Wilson’s talk.

On his geeky childhood in Seattle: “Somehow in junior high, I went from playing clarinet to my junior high music teacher convincing me that I should play the bassoon. He said: ‘there is this really cool instrument called the bassoon. Girls are gonna love it if you can play this incredibly difficult double-reed instrument that you have to put together by hand. It makes this sound, like a tiny little yak fart. It’s like an old person farting.’ It’s the worst instrument in the world.

What I did through the course of my life is that I climbed the ‘Amway pyramid of geekdom.’ I started at the worst with Dungeons and Dragons and the bassoon. In fact, for awhile in the marching band I played the xylophone because you can’t march with a bassoon, and the Shorecrest Highlanders, we wore kilts. I was 97 pounds, covered in acne, with a kilt and a xylophone.

I became a drama geek when I moved to Chicago and started acting. Then I realized that this is the kind of geekdom where girls actually liked you if you could make them laugh, and that kind of created my career and the rest is history. So I no longer play the bassoon!”

Rainn Wilson
Rainn Wilson talks about his support of the Mona Foundation

On his rise to fame and the impetus to do charitable work: “A very strange thing started happened when I started getting famous for The Office. I started getting approached from all these different non-profits and charities. I had to do some really deep soul-searching about what I wanted to do now that I was in the public eye as an actor, in terms of making the world a better place. I had an incredible opportunity that was out in front of me, and I didn’t really know how to proceed.

I started digging in to all the kinds of non-profits that are out there. What I settled on was education. For me, I believed that if we want to make the world a better place, the number one way to do that is through education. If you want to change the economy or if you want to address poverty, you do it through education. If you want to address the environment, really you do it through education. If you want to address any of the social ills that we have in the world, it’s through uplifting and empowering young people that is going to have the maximum impact.

On his involvement with the Mona Foundation: I wanted to be part of a non-profit that was small, that I could grow with, that I could help grow and could grow with me.

The thing that I most responded to about the Mona Foundation was this idea of grassroots education. What the Mona Foundation does is it scours the world and finds grassroots educational initiatives that were created there. They are grassroots. They were locally-created by people to make their environments better, to transform their local community.

One of the focuses of Mona Foundation is the education of women and girls. The more I dug into this, the more excited I was about this idea of educating women and girls.

When you educate a young girl, they spread what they learned with their communities. These girls go back out to their very, very poor villages in remote areas and they spread what they learned. They have kids, and they obviously teach those kids, but they teach their mothers, their aunts, their cousins, their sisters and their girlfriends, and the education multiplies and spreads. If you teach a young 15-year old boy in the same situation a job skill like that, he is just going to move to the big city and become an Uber driver.

On the hassle being a celebrity in the age of the smart phone: “I grow a huge beard so that I’m not recognized. I go unrecognizable most of the time. I sometimes take pictures but if I’m with my family or it is a pain in the butt, I don’t.

It’s tricky because everyone has not only a camera in their pocket, but they have a computer in their pocket and a video camera. They can make an entire movie with their phone. I’ve found videos on Youtube of me eating lunch where I’m pickin’ my nose.

Rainn Wilson

On his favorite Dwight Schrute quote: My personal favorite Dwight quote is a very little known one because it’s the one where I really recognized that The Office was taking off, that this was something special that was sweeping the nation.

I was in an airport in Detroit and this guy ran up to me with his phone and was like: ‘Hey, hey, hey read this.’ And he handed me his phone and it said: ‘I can, and do, in fact, cut my own hair.’ He said: ‘my daughter and I, we send Dwight quotes back and forth.’ So I knew that we were on to something, and that is a very special quote to me.”

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