Rainn Wilson: My First...

The veteran actor—best known for playing geeky megalomaniac Dwight Schrute on NBC’s The  Office—moves out of his perennial supporting-actor niche with new big-screen comedy  The Rocker. It’s his first starring role, a natural  opportunity to inquire about some of his other firsts.

First acting experience: Schroeder, in a high-school-cafeteria production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. “I had to beat the talent scouts away with a stick. It was kind of crazy. It was a feeding frenzy.”

First band he really loved: Queen. “I think I was about 14 or 15 when ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ came out. And I got all the Queen albums and I just loved Queen, and I still love Queen. I play Queen for my son—he’s three-and-a-half—and he just goes crazy and we dance around. I mean, they were visionaries. And their stuff will always be classic.”

First concert: J. Geils Band, Angel is the Centerfold Tour at the Seattle Coliseum, 1982.  “It was early high school and I was terrified ’cause there were a lot of tattooed, weird older dudes. And then the concert started and the pot pipes came out. And it was just a fog of pot smoke. It was like a big, green fog had descended on the stadium. People were offering us joints and I was just terrified—terrified—at joints being offered to me.”

First thing people mentioned when commenting on The Office during season one: The British Office.  “Literally every third person was like, ‘I have to tell you, I was the hugest fan of the English show, and I never thought you guys would be able to do it, but you did it.’ And it’s like, people don’t see what a clichéd opinion that is. It’s such a tired opinion about anything. Like, ‘I was a big fan of the book version of blah blah blah, and I didn’t think the movie could work, but I really liked the movie.’ It’s so easy to be on a too-cool-for-school pedestal.”

First time getting something free for being Rainn Wilson: At the 2003 Screen Actors Guild Awards after Six Feet Under won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. “I’d been acting for 13 or 14 years at that point and never been to an awards show before. And we won, and they were like, ‘Oh, would you like to go to the gift suite?’ And we were like, ‘What?’ I’d never even heard of this before. But, yeah, they usher you into this little room where people give you stuff. And it was amazing to see these multimillionaire actors elbowing each other to try and get free stuff—like Marcia Gay Harden and Andie MacDowell kind of like pawing their way to get free shoes and a Weber grill and aviator glasses.”