Rainn Wilson changes his Twitter name — sort of — for climate change ‘stunt’ The actor has been accused of making light of her son’s autism
Ladies and gentleman: This is how you change your twitter name so you’re not in trouble with the law (Twitter)The Twitter name change for actor Rainn Wilson was originally intended to be funny. It wasn’t in the script, but it seemed like good fun anyway.
When writer-director Josh Singer tweeted that he wanted to do a story about climate change being used as an excuse for rape, Wilson responded by suggesting he take a walk on the wild side. Singer took him up on the offer. Not long after that, Singer said Wilson’s name had been changed — not to Rains, as Singer said, but to “Rainn Wilson on the Climate.”
I wrote to Singer immediately after I learned about this. He said he planned to make the same joke this time, but that he would use Wilson’s name because he said he wanted to “make something that feels really different” from the other Climate-related films he had made.
I’m not sure what he made “really different,” as Singer said, but it was still something I found amusing. I didn’t share it on Twitter until Singer’s tweet was posted for several hours, and then, after that, I found myself tweeting it multiple times. By then, many people had used it, so that in an attempt to be funny I took it to an entirely different level.
“I got a ton of tweets from people saying, ‘I know you’re joking, but I really want my name changed to this,’” Wilson said in an interview after meeting the actor at a film festival where Singer was making a climate documentary. Singer “was like, ‘No, no, no!’”
When Singer said he would use Wilson’s name, he was “just making fun of someone else’s joke,” Wilson said. “We all have different identities.”
And in the end, it turned out people didn’t care. Singer’s tweet was liked and shared thousands
