Entertainment

Every actor dreams of the moment when he steps out of the periphery and into the spotlight. One day, your name shares the credits with three others; the next, you're above the title.

For Rainn Wilson, that day has arrived.

Best known for his role as by-the-book Dwight Schrute on NBC's The Office, Mr. Wilson is now the star as the comedy The Rocker opens Wednesday.

"This is the first time in my life where I've played like The Lead, who's in every scene of the movie and drives the film from beginning to end," Mr. Wilson said during a stop in Dallas recently. "Dwight and a lot of the secondary characters that I've been used to playing are always in reaction to the lead person. There's a very different energy and a very different requirement of you as an actor to be in the driver's seat. What is motivating your character motivates the whole movie."

The Rocker follows Robert "Fish" Fishman, a bitter former drummer of the megaselling hair-metal band Vesuvius. Just as the band is about to break big, the other members decide it's time for a change behind the drum kit and kick Fish to the curb. Stuck in a desk job 20 years later and thinking about what might have been, he gets a second chance at superstardom when his nephew's band needs an emergency fill-in to play a gig. From there, it's full steam ahead for Fish as he attempts to recapture his stolen glory while teaching his much-younger bandmates what it means to rock.

TOM FOX/DMN

Pop musicians have long been a source of comedy, from 1984's This Is Spinal Tap to Russell Brand's preening rock star in this spring's Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The Rocker mines many of the same stereotypes and clichés for laughs, but the film sets its sights primarily on the over-the-top antics of the rock drummer.

When Mr. Wilson and director Peter Cattaneo went to work shaping the character, there was no shortage of material to pluck from.

"We did a lot of research on YouTube watching hair-metal band drummers," Mr. Wilson says. "What a heavy-metal drummer does is very different than what a regular alternative rock band drummer does. Pumping up the crowd, they're larger than life."

"It's a brilliant character because they are famously always the crazy guy, the eccentric, and it's all because they're the one who's holding it all together in terms of the music," Mr. Cattaneo says by phone from London. Both star and director are in their early 40s and admit that they favored acts such as the Clash and Elvis Costello over Mötley Crüe and Poison during the '80s.

Still, those later bands make a comedian's job much simpler 20 years later.

"If you've got a wig on and you're wearing spandex and cowboy boots and you're carrying drumsticks – that kinda does all your work for you," Mr. Wilson says. "It's not that hard to transform when you've got all that going on."

Except when you transform too much.

"I had to tell him that it was important that that belly stayed," Mr. Cattaneo says. "He actually started losing a little weight during production with all that drumming and drum practice, and he had to sort of push his belly out a bit, because it was important that he didn't look buff, that he had an everyman sort of body."

Now that Mr. Wilson has landed the lead, you needn't worry that he'll quit playing his brand of oddball supporting characters such as the nosy store clerk in last year's Juno or Arthur Martin, the funeral-home intern on HBO's Six Feet Under.

When he first landed the role of Dwight on The Office, for which he's been nominated for two Emmys, he had a conversation with an executive producer and writer on the show about the character. What Mr. Wilson discovered should serve as a clue to the work he finds appealing.

"One thing that Greg Daniels said that really sparked my imagination is that this guy has a great love of hierarchies," he says. "There's something about a guy who loves hierarchical structures that just opened up a whole world of imagination for me."

Those types of tightly focused, way-out-there characters typically revolve around a more baseline presence such as Steve Carell's boss of The Office. While Mr. Wilson's happy to be front-and-center for once, he knows he'll always thrive in the meaty supporting roles he's known for.

"I don't think that I as an actor could ever play a character that does fit in, that's popular, well-liked and right in the middle of everything. That's just not who I am."

If Rainn Wilson looks familiar in a context other than movies or television, perhaps you remember him from the stage. In 1994, he had a role in the Dallas Theater Center's production of Room Service, a 1920s screwball farce directed by former artistic director Richard Hamburger. In a review of the play, Dallas Morning News theater critic Lawson Taitte wrote that Mr. Wilson infused his character with a doltish sweetness that made him irresistibly funny.

Stephen Becker