Rainn Wilson was in his 30s, a jobbing actor who did a nixer as a removal man to make ends meet. Then he got a part in the US version of The Office. He tells Donald Clarkeabout late-onset fame

THE routes to fame are many and various. Five years ago, Rainn Wilson, now an affable chap in his early 40s, was barely getting by as a jobbing actor and a spiritually inclined removal man. "We had a slogan," he tells me. "A Man. A Van. A Higher Sense of Purpose." The acting gigs never dried up entirely, but, as middle-age loomed, attaining proper success seemed increasingly unlikely.

When he landed the part of Dwight Schrute in the US version of The Office, there was no guarantee that situation would change. It was a tasty role - Dwight is Pennsylvania's answer to pathetic Gareth Keenan in the British show - but American adaptations of British sitcoms rarely get past the pilot stage.

"The first video iPods came out about that time," Wilson muses. "And I think I knew the series was working when I went through the mall and suddenly saw people watching it." Sure enough, the series has now stretched to five seasons and Rainn has found a great deal of work as a comic supporting player. He was in House of 1,000 Corpsesand Juno, and this week he takes a starring role in the innocuous comedy The Rocker.

Directed by Peter Cattaneo, the man behind The Full Monty, the picture finds Rainn playing a drummer from a 1980s poodle-rock band who enjoys belated fame playing with a contemporary pop-rock group. Rainn is easily old enough to remember the vulgar excesses of Reagan-era rock music. Did he enjoy it at the time?

"Oh no. I thought it was an abomination," he says. "I hated that music.

Ratt, Poison, Whitesnake: when the groups began wearing more make-up than my mother I began to worry. But, you know, there is an honesty to them. They just want to rock. There is none of this seriousness you get from certain Irish bands." I suspect he has one particular band in mind. "Maybe I do. They are so, so precious."

Rainn, born in Washington State, has brought his wife, children's author Holiday Reinhorn, and their infant son to London for promotional duties on The Rocker. He enjoys the city, but he has come to learn that many fans of the original Office resent his supposed appropriation of their clumsy idol.

"I would often looked at England and see these snaggle-toothed, ruddy, proper-voiced weirdos. I'd wonder how on earth they ruled the world for 200 years. When I saw the dogged persistence with which they talked about the British version of The Office, I understood. They have the tenacity of bulldogs."

Wilson is an unusual fellow. Both he and his wife - they are called Rainn and Holiday, remember - are members of the Bahá'í Faith, a relatively harmless quasi-religion that stresses tolerance, but, commendably, Wilson appears content to rant at any body of people that rub him up the wrong way. It's one thing to diss the English, it's quite another to offer coded swipes at the blessed U2.

"We do live by a moral law in the Bahá'í Faith he says," he says. "But it is, I suppose, much less dogmatic than other religions. We are taught to seek the truth for ourselves."

"It probably is good that I had to wait," he says. "It just makes me appreciate what I have and not take it for granted. I spent so many years just above the poverty line. And, yes, I might have gone insane if I had had a couple of hundred thousand dollars when I was young. I might have been injecting heroin into my eyeballs." On the upside, such an experience might have been very good preparation for his role as a drummer in a poodle-rock band.

• The Rocker opens nationwide today