‘The Office’: Is Dwight Schrute Amish?
As much as we all want The Office to reboot, at least it left behind a bevy of classic characters we’ll be analyzing for years to come. While all of them had their own eccentricities, one of the funniest and most offbeat was Dwight Schrute.
Played by Rainn Wilson, there was always speculation he has an Amish background. This was never completely verified, yet numerous quotes exist that seem to indicate similar family connections, if not having Amish tendencies himself.
You sustained fans of The Office may want to take a minute to solve one of the biggest rumors from one of the show’s most quoted characters.
Dwight’s oddball family
When you take a deeper look into Dwight’s family, you see that not all of them were Amish. This doesn’t mean they’re not all eccentric as Dwight is. We saw some members of his family during the run of the show, including his sister and brother. Latter became a worm farmer, which seems to indicate the Amish lifestyle was in the blood.
The first reference to Dwight having an Amish background in his family was mention of his great-grandfather who definitely was Amish. A deleted scene from The Office once had Dwight saying his grandfather was also Amish, even though what made it to air always made it seem there was little known about his grandfather.
One thing for sure is Dwight was always a target of practical jokes from Jim Halpert. Their repartee made for a lot of memorable quotes, including Dwight sometimes making sarcastic Amish references.
With all these Amish aspects swimming around in his brain, was Dwight secretly wanting to live an Amish lifestyle alongside a secular lifestyle?
The clues from Schrute Farms
To further prove Dwight’s Amish tendencies, you can look no further than his Schrute Farms located in Northeastern Pennsylvania. There’s still some speculation on how he acquired this farm, but a deleted scene claimed he won it after playing a game of Blackjack. No one considers this canon, though, and we’re mostly to assume the farm was passed on to him from his family.
You can essentially call Dwight a beet farmer considering this is what Schrute Farms produced. He also turned it into a makeshift bed and breakfast, giving him a smart investment next to his job at Dunder-Mifflin.
Living as a farmer and still working in a typical corporate office atmosphere is what made Dwight Schrute such a unique character. At least he did manage to make his agricultural bent a bit hipper by also producing hemp.
This desire to be literally down-to-earth managed to cross over to many of Dwight’s other assets, including his car.
Deliberately not staying in modern times
Another identifiable trait of Dwight is the car he drives. As we all know, Amish still don’t own cars and continually use horses and wagons. We certainly saw Dwight make recurring references to horses, although he did own a car. It just wasn’t a very new one, if still a classic. For most of the run of the show, he drove a 1987 Pontiac Trans Am. Later, however, he upgraded to a new car.
His technological knowledge was also quite limited, making his Amish connections all the more obvious. Outside of this, he seemed to be more or less sarcastic about his Amish heritage. One quote drolly suggests he didn’t really want to focus too seriously on his background:
“Dwight Schrute. My father’s name, also Dwight Schrute. My grandfather’s name, Dweide Schrude, Amish. That’s my family. I don’t know where they came, the Amish, came from originally. Uh, Amland.”
No matter how much Dwight tried to hide his Amish tendencies, he made it look cool. He likely made fans take a look at what they could pare down in their lives while still balancing corporate careers and living in the real world.
