Rainn Wilson is jovial and full of jokes when we meet at the 20th Century Fox building in NYC to promote his musical comedy The Rocker, which is in theaters now. The Office star, 42, is married to wife Holiday, and together they care for son Walter, 3. 

In this interview, Rainn talks about family, fame and growing up with a “unique” name.

Ever regret that you didn’t become famous until later in life?
I’m happy the way it worked out. I couldn’t be more thrilled. I struggled for a long time, the first ten years of my career, and now things are taking off. I have no regrets that I wish this or that had happened. I’m a much better actor now than I was then. I needed to learn. Some people are like Leonardo DiCaprio and immediately brilliant at 19.  I wasn’t that way. I was learning and being in the trenches.

What was your experience like growing up with a unique name?
I was tormented terribly for being named Rainn and mocked and that’s what made me the sad clown you see before
 you. I do like my name very much. It came from my hippie, bohemian parents who lived on
 a houseboat in the late sixties.

Did growing up on a houseboat sour you or make you love the ocean more?
 I love the ocean. I'm a Seattleite. I like the mountains and
 the ocean both. I still go back to Seattle. My wife and I have a cabin
 up in Oregon.

How do you like to relax in your spare time?
I like to do this. [Turns around in chair and stares at me.] You’re wordsmiths. I leave it to you. I like to play tennis. That's my new passion. I feel like an old
 Southern Californian but I love to play tennis. That really
 relaxes me. I also like to kill people on X-Box Call of Duty 4 and go online and shoot people in the face. I also find that very
 relaxing. I also like to sleep.

Don’t you have a young son?
Yes.

That’s not relaxing?
That’s not relaxing with the little one. That’s a workout. I love it, but relaxing, no.

Did you have rock star dreams?
I got to thankfully live through a little bit of a rocker nightmare, 
which was my probably shortest-lived high school band ever. I did two gigs with
 my band Collective Moss; I wish I still had that flyer. We played two
 gigs, one for a bunch of 11-year-olds who ended up stealing our patch
 chords in a church basement. Then our second gig was an audition for
 the Battle of The Bands, which we didn't get into. That's how bad we
 were; we were not even in the top six bands at New Trier High School [in Illinois]. I was the singer.

What’s your best concert memory?
I never caught a drumstick and I've never been sweated on but I got to see Nirvana in their last U.S. concert and
 that was a thrill for me as a Pacific Northwest Nirvana freak.

Did you go backstage and meet Kurt Cobain?
No, I
 wasn't a huge international superstar like I am now to throw my weight
 around with my posse. My favorite concert memories are about the
 music. I saw Radiohead last year and that was pretty awesome. Doing
 this VH-1 Rock Honors The Who concert was just tremendous. I got to
 meet The Who and they were idols of mine growing up.  I just thought
 Pete Townsend was the best and I got to interview Flaming Lips and
 Dave Grohl and Pearl Jam. That was really awesome to be part of the
 experience.

Did Christina Applegate mind being cast as a sexy mom?
This was her first sexy mom role, and I’m sure there will be many more. I think she knew, she was like ‘You know what, I’m late 30s now, it’s time for me to tip-toe into the sexy mom world.’ She’s amazing. She’s so deft with comedy, just a light touch, and she’s hot and smart and really cool. We had a blast. I’m really psyched, and now we’re both Emmy nominees.

Why should we see this film?
The Rocker is awesome. It’s The Awesomer. It’s The Rawesome.  The Rocker is Rawesome. See I should do Fox’s work for them. It’s the first great heavy metal movie. It’s got it all. It’s got me macking on Christina Applegate, every man’s fantasy, it’s got great music, comedic hijinks, and it’s also got a lot of heart.

Maggie Gyllenhaal points to her diamond-encrusted watch saying “my daughter wears this” during the launch party for Piaget’s Paris-New York collection held at The Loft and Garden at Rockefeller Center in NYC.

Meanwhile, newly engaged Mena Suvari dashes between the inside party and the outside garden to show off her rock to pals Emmy Rossum and Zoe Kravitz, saying “It’s from my boyfriend – now my fiancé.”

Liv Tyler is in good spirits, shaking hands and smiling when she elevators into the soiree. A reporter asks, “How do you keep your teeth so white?,” which she calls “the most embarrassing question ever!”

Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester greets me with “hi, how are you?” while she is chilling by the pool outside. This is just the first event on her sked tonight. “I’m actually going to see the Police right now,” she says.

Here’s Emmy, who attended NYC’s posh Spence School. Was it anything like Gossip Girl? “Yes, but with less testosterone,” she tells me. “I don’t think there was as many tables at Butter or as many Prada handbags, but probably close.” (Get this -- she’s allergic to toothpaste!)

Ugly Betty’s Becki Newton is thrilled with the show’s move to the Big Apple.

“It’s going great,” she tells me. “It’s so nice to be shooting in New York City, especially when we’re outside. We’re so, so happy to be here.”

She calls Rebeccca Romijn a “happy, warm person. She’s going to be a great mom.”

What’s Becki’s fashion mantra?

“Try to have fun and not worry too much,” she says. “I don’t like to limit myself. One minute I’m obsessed with color, and then today I’m all in black. There really are no rules. I just try everything.”

 
Pick up the OK! on newsstands now for more coverage of Piaget’s Paris-New York collection. “Britney Tells All About Her Boys And Her New Life” is the cover line.

The Jonas Brothers and their parents Denise and Kevin take to the W Hotel in NYC to accept a $100,000 check for the boys’ Change For The Children Foundation from Bayer Diabetes Care.

Nick, who was diagnosed with diabetes in 2005, is a diabetes ambassador who blogs about his experiences on nickssimplewins.com.

According to the 15-year-old boy bander, rapid weightloss, frequent bathroom usage, changing attitude and food cravings were signs that he had developed the medical condition, but his parents didn’t notice his decline because they weren’t with them on tour.

Wait, a bad attitude?

“A bad attitude is an uncontrollable thing and that’s one of the symptoms,” Nick says. “For me, being on tour, having a bad attitude with people at 7:30 in the morning is not a good environment. I was also having weird cravings where you have things that come up and I was like ‘I need Pizza Hut.’ That was it, that’s all I needed. Our tour manager was like ‘we’re going to stop for some food, what do you guys want?’ and I said ‘Pizza Hut. I need to have Pizza Hut.’ And I am a very nice person, and usually I’m flexible when it comes to food choices, but in this case I wasn’t really flexible. I made them pull the car over to go there.”

Mom Denise says, “As the mother of teenagers, I heard a lot about ‘oh they’re just being a teenager’ but we never let ourselves think with that whole philosophy that kids when they’re two have to be terrible twos. We were like ‘we’re going to call it the terrific twos, and we’re going to teach them what’s proper behavior.’ So when our kids were acting unusual, we didn’t think ‘oh, they’re acting like teenagers.’ We let them know that life is not about themselves all the time – it’s about this family and other people. Nick was an exceptionally wonderful child – he was a little different from his brothers [laughs] – he really didn’t need to be corrected. That’s how he got the nickname Mr. President. So when he did start to show those signs, we didn’t say ‘he’s just acting like a teenager.’ As a parent, don’t just blow it off. Pay attention to their mood swings.”

Mom Denise urges parents to get their kids tested if they see signs.

“Move quickly because it could take over very rapidly and it could be very serious,” she says.

How did his brothers react to the changes and diagnosis?

“We were on tour and we shared a room, and we went to the pool,” Joe, 19, says. “He took off his shirt, and you could see his bones, so I was really scared. I said to my parents ‘mom and dad, there’s something wrong with Nick. We have to go to the hospital today.’ I remember my dad being like ‘when I was growing up, it was kind of the same thing.’ I was like ‘I don’t know dad.’”

Joe continues, “I remember going to the hospital and freaking out and actually passing out on the floor because I didn’t know what diabetes was. I’m happy that he’s OK now, and I’m happy that he’s in the band. At every meet-and-greet, thousands of kids walk through thanking Nick for being such a positive light. You get onstage, and he talks about his message and his story, and a lot of kids can relate. It’s really cool.”

Explaining the condition to their brother Frankie, now 7, proved comical.

“I told him there’s something wrong with my pancreas,” Nick says. “Once I got comfortable, I wasn’t so sensitive and I could take a joke. I do pull it some times, like ‘I’m diabetic, you know.’ Once I started pulling that, Frankie used to call me Pancreas Boy. That was the nickname I got.”

Kevin, 20, says, “We all sat down with Frankie and said ‘Nick is in the hospital, he’s being taken care of and he’ll be home in a couple days.’ I remember this look over his face, and he told us [confidently] ‘he’ll be OK.’”

How do his costars like Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez handle it when he tells them he’s diabetic?

“It’s always ‘oh my cousin or my friend had this,’” Nick says. “When I tell them ‘this is how it works, and this is how this works so if I’m ever in an emergency, this is what you need to do,’ then I can educate.”

“And one thing for all the dads out there who tell their kids to ‘just walk it off,’ don’t, because I made every excuse possible,” Dad Kevin says. “Typically, if they strained their ankle I was trained to say ‘walk it off’ and they’d end up with a broken foot. In diabetes, it was a case of rapid weightloss, he was lethargic.”

Nick chimes in, “When I said ‘Dad, I lost 15 lbs. in two weeks, is there something wrong?’ he was like ‘I lost 15 lbs in two weeks when I was your age.’”

Nick adjusts for high blood sugar with insulin, and low blood sugar with food.

Dad Kevin continues, “We operate as a family, so when Nick has a low before he goes onstage, everybody’s on call and they’re just watching Nick onstage, waiting with supplies, snacks and juice ready to help him.”

It’s all worth it for Nick.

“Hearing people say to me that ‘you’re an inspiration’ just means so much because all I’m doing is trying to make it through another day with diabetes, and they’re doing the same,” Nick says. “We need to do that for each other.”

 

The Jonas Brothers tune A Little Bit Longer  was inspired by Nick's diabetes fight.

 

“Originally the concept of the song started out as a love song,” he says. “It really had a strong impression when we were on the set of Camp Rock about nine months ago. My sugar was so out of range, and I was having a rough day, so I sat down at the piano and wrote a song in twenty minutes. I think it was because I had the inspiration from how I was feeling. It says ‘you don’t know what it’s like to feel so low.’ Lyrics that I write – I always try to have a double meaning to them. The low concept, the whole concept is you don’t even know.”

Nick continues, “People always say ‘so you can’t eat this, you can’t eat that’ and I say to them ‘no, I just have to manage what I eat and make sure I take insulin for it.’ It’s a little frustrating to be like ‘this is how it is, this is how it works.’ That whole concept is 'we can relate with each other but knowing I don’t know specifically how you feel.’ A lot of people have told me that they’re happy I can share my story, and they can relate to it.”

Taylor Swift may be 18, but her career is six years in the making. The Should’ve Said No singer began writing songs at 12, and visited Nashville every weekend beginning at 13 in hopes of one day becoming the star she is today.

“I guess I found something that I loved, and was good at, and just never stopped and never put it down,” she tells me of her drive. “Music was the one thing that I felt like I was comfortable doing. It was the first time I felt at home – when I started playing music and writing songs. I never stopped being in love with it.”

She is proud to be called a role model even though fellow teen icons like Vanessa Hudgens, Miley Cyrus and Jamie Lynn Spears have taken hard knocks under the spotlight’s glare.

“The pressure to be a good role model makes me a better person,” Taylor tells me. “I like it. It makes me keep my life in line, definitely, knowing that people are watching. I think it’s one of the most amazing compliments in the world, when a mother walks up and says ‘thank you for being a good role model for my daughter’ because that compliments your character.”

As a role model, Taylor has gazillions of girls copying her style.

How can we get hair like her’s?

“It’s crazy,” she laughs. “I used to hate my hair. When I was in middle school, every cool girl had straight hair, and I wanted straight hair so bad, but I had curly hair. My hair’s naturally curly, and it’s naturally the way it looks, but if you want to replicate it, I suggest – there are two different ways to curl your hair. Try wrapping the curl around the barrel [of the curling iron] and that will create a better spiral curl. That’s my best advice.”

What’s her style secret?

“My favorite outfit is a sundress paired with boots. That’s my favorite thing to wear, but lately I’ve been liking accessories. Lately I’ve been wearing a silk scarf around my neck, or I’ll wear a million necklaces and a bunch of bracelets. I like to accessorize.”

Pick up the OK! on newsstands now for a Quick Chat with Taylor Swift. “Britney Tells All About Her Boys And Her New Life” is the cover line. And, catch Taylor on the CMA Music Festival, which airs September 8 on ABC.