Rainn Wilson has reflected on his time starring in The Office, calling out one particular episode for being ‘jaw-droppingly horrific’.
The 59-year-old starred as salesman Dwight Schrute across all nine seasons of the wildly successful sitcom – which ran between 2005 and 2013 and followed the employees of paper company Dunder Mifflin.
Steve Carell led the way as manager Michael Scott while John Krasinski, Jenna Fisher, Ed Helms, Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak were among the cast.
In recent years, there have been intense discussions over how the show would be received if it was airing today, with Mindy suggesting that it is ‘so inappropriate now’.
During an appearance on the Last Laugh podcast, Rainn was asked whether there was a storyline or plot that made him uncomfortable, and didn’t hesitate to share his thoughts.
‘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 horrific,’ he replied.
‘It’s a tricky conversation. They’re clueless, and in their cluelessness, they’re racist and insensitive, and they’re always saying the wrong thing.
‘That’s Michael, Dwight, and Andy — and Kevin (Brian Baumgartner) for that matter.
‘It’s a show based around clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that mirrors the United States in a lot of ways.
‘You want to encourage it, because it’s funny as hell, and it also skewers a particular American sensibility. But it definitely goes pretty far if you dig deep.
‘Could it happen today? I think it would have to be very, very different if it were made in this environment.’
A Benihana Christmas, the hour-long episode in question aired in December 2006, as part of the show’s third season – it followed Andy attempting to cheer up a newly-single and very heartbroken Michael, following his break-up with Carol Stills.
They went to Benihana with Dwight and Jim, where they got drunk and returned to the office with two waitresses.
When Michael struggled to tell the two Asian women apart, and decipher his date, he drew a mark so that he could identify her.
The Office was a spin-off of the UK version of the sitcom, starring Ricky Gervais as cringe-inducing manager David Brent.
Mackenzie Crook, who played his assistant, Gareth Keenan, previously touched on their efforts in front of the camera for a candid interview in 2021, and suggested that certain moments of the workplace comedy wouldn’t fly today.
‘He’s a bit of a monster actually, Gareth,’ he told the Independent, branding the series a ‘document of its time’.
‘I didn’t remember him being so… urgh. The things he comes out with when he’s trying to chat up girls are diabolical.
‘What we were portraying back then were things that were being said in an office environment, and people were getting away with it. So we were pointing it out – laughing at those people who were behaving so badly.
‘I don’t think those things could be said in a workplace anymore without somebody picking up on them. So no, you wouldn’t have it now in a comedy.’
‘Although a lot of it was based on cruel humor, the best bits are the bits that have so much heart and bring a lump to your throat,’ he added. ‘Without those bits, it would have been just a bit relentlessly cruel.’
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