Rainn Wilson says competition between The Office UK and US is ‘absurd’

Rainn Wilson has said that competition between The Office UK and US is 'absurd', admitting that the British version created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant is 'brilliant'.

Wilson shot to fame with the US adaption of the UK classic, starring as Dwight Schrute over nine seasons between 2005 and 2013.

Also featuring the likes of Steve Carell and John Krasinski, the US version of The Office followed the office lives of Dunder Mifflin employees working at the fictional paper in Pennsylvania.

The show was lightly based off the BBC's The Office - though many sequences were toned down and adapted for the US audience.

NBC

But despite being shown in completely different countries, many fans made comparisons between the two shows.

During a recent appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of A CEO podcast, Wilson spoke about the 'competition' between the two classic series of the same name.

He said: "That competition (between the UK and US The Office) is absurd, the anger and vitriol that you Brits brought to the fact that Americans were going to remake the beloved The Office. It was so staggering and enraged."

YouTube/The Diary Of A CEO

When an adaption of The Office coming to the US was announced, many wondered how it would stack up.

However, there were other Brits that were straight up annoyed that their beloved show was being re-imagined for a US audience.

Recalling what he was saying at the time, Wilson added: "'Guys the English The Office isn’t going anywhere, we’re not going to take all the English copies and burn them'."

The actor went on to say the OG The Office is 'astonishingly brilliant', adding that the idea ahead of The Office US was 'to run with [the idea]'.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Wilson spoke candidly about his mental health struggles over the years, and even undergoing 22 years of therapy.

"I experienced a lot of pain in my life, and a lot of suffering with anxiety and depression and addiction," he said.

"As I dove into recovery and the therapeutic process, I can pin that squarely on a lot of gross imbalances and trauma that I suffered as a child.

"It’s important to excavate and honour the pain we went through, the lies that we were told, the gaslighting that we might have undergone, religious trauma as well, all kinds of different traumas that we suffer."