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It’s a good time to be a geek, and few people have reaped the benefits more than Rainn Wilson. Best known for playing Dwight Schrute, the beet-farming assistant (to the) regional manager on The Office, the three-time Emmy nominated actor spoke with Spirit about how his geek past helped him get ahead.

SM: You’ve got some impressive geek credentials: the cover of Geek Monthly and People’s sexiest geek.

RW: I’ve been on the cover of Geek twice, actually. I’m the only guy to ever be on the cover two different times. It’s a badge I wear proudly.

Were you always a geek or were you really giving wedgies to the hall monitor?

Oh, back in high school I could outgeek anybody. There was one specific point in time during my sophomore year when I was in orchestra, marching band, pottery club, model U.N., computer club, debate club, and the chess team. No joke. 

You make Bill Gates look like Ferris Bueller. Was there at least a cute violinist?

Yeah, but it’s not like I played some cool instrument. I was a bassoonist. I wasn’t exactly serenading the ladies with my bassoon. 

But these days all those geeks are having the last laugh.

Absolutely. Over the last two years it’s sort of become the new cool. Rock stars used to look like Eddie Van Halen. Now you’ve got Beck and Death Cab for Cutie. Music was sort of the vanguard through which geeky guys could be seen as cute.

Death Cab’s  lead singer just got engaged to Zooey Deschanel.

Exactly! If this were the late ’70s or early ’80s, Zooey Deschanel would be with the lead singer of Ratt.

Musicians always get the girls. What about geeks who can’t play a G-chord?

There’s a hierarchy. Access to girls determines the order. Drama geeks and band geeks are at the top, obviously. Lots of very beautiful women do school plays. I really moved up the ladder when I graduated from chess to drama club.  

Is there any hope if your acting skills are worse than Michael Scott’s one-liners?

There’s the war gamers, the hard-core World of Warcraft geeks. Jocks and popular kids still play those games, so it’s gotten cooler. Then you’ve got comic book geeks, who’ve risen up the ladder lately because a lot of girls are getting into them. After that, it’s probably brainiacs and A/V geeks—the guys who bring the projectors to the classroom. 

Hey, you’ve seen Fight Club. Don’t mess with the projectionist. So who comes last?

Smelly geeks. Easy. They are the great unwashed. The ones so geeky they’ve left personal hygiene behind. True story: I went to a chess competition once, and there was this guy who came to watch. I noticed that he had mold growing on his ears. I don’t know how many weeks you have to go without showering to sustain that kind of microorganism.

Well, there goes lunch. You haven’t mentioned our favorite: eco geeks.

Eco geeks definitely have some cred. For starters, Al Gore is their patron saint. An Inconvenient Truth is constantly in their DVD player. They might be traveling the world on a motorcycle or covering the Great Wall of China on their Segway. There’s almost an element of danger to it. Eco geeks would probably throw their chairs through the window of the Starbucks if they saw you pulling up to the G8 summit in a Hummer, and then immediately go back to their diagrams of their new backyard windmill design.

Speaking of diagrams, what would you commission the geeks of the world to invent if you were given the chance?

I would like them to invent a device that would guarantee me victory over John Krasinski in fantasy football. Or something that manufactures rainbows or unicorns. Also, a world peace machine would be nice.

And if world peace is just out of reach?

Seriously, just take care of your personal hygiene. As long as you don’t have mold growing on your ears, everything will work out in the end.