The Office’s Rainn Wilson joins George R.R. Martin’s Dark Winds show on AMC

George R.R. Martin is best known for writing the Song of Ice and Fire books, the basis for HBO’s Game of Thrones series. Although at this point, he might be better known for not writing the Song of Ice and Fire books, as fans are still waiting for the next book in the series, The Winds of Winter, 10 years on.

One of the reasons the book has been so long in coming is because Martin gets involved in other projects, although often it’s in a ceremonial way. For instance, he and Robert Redford have signed on as executive producers to the AMC show Dark Winds, an adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee novels. The show stars Zahn McClarnon (Westworld) and Kiowa Gordon (The Red Road) as a pair of Navajo police officers trying to solve a “grisly double-murder case” in the 1980s. The show is filmed on Native American lands with the support of the Navajo Nation, and has a writers room staffed exclusively with Native American writers. Neither Martin nor Redford are actually going to do the heavy lifting here: their names are in the credits so the producers could convince AMC to make the show in the first place.

And now, Deadline reports that Rainn Wilson, best known as Dwight Schrute from The Office, has joined the show as a “pious missionary who relies on his divine faith to recruit followers to the gates of his used-car lot” and who is “a degenerate and practitioner of every biblical sin he decries.” Sounds fun!

There’s no release date for Dark Winds as of yet, but expect the first season on AMC and AMC+ sometime in 2022.

George R.R. Martin gave an interview at his Winds of Winter getaway cabin

And Dark Winds isn’t the only non-Winds of Winter thing that Martin is part of. He revealed today on his Not a Blog that he’ll be a talking head in Once Upon a Time in Queens, a four-part documentary series about the 1986 New York Mets that premieres on ESPN on September 14. Martin was in the area at the time and has some powerful memories. “Parris and I were at Game Six. And THAT experience I will remember till my dying day.”

Martin writes that the documentarians visited “my cabin” a few months ago to talk to him for “an hour or so (and never asked once about THE WINDS OF WINTER or the new GAME OF THRONES successor shows I am developing for HBO).” So again, it’s not like this little endeavor actually took him away from writing.

But because I’m A Song of Ice and Fire obsessive, the note about the interviewers coming to Martin’s “cabin” is interesting. Martin has written before about basically retreating to a remote cabin in the mountains so he can focus on writing The Winds of Winter in peace, and it sounds like that’s where he was when this interview took place.

So if anything, this is evidence that he’s working hard on The Winds of Winter rather than getting distracted from it. Does that mean we’ll ever actually get to read it? I have no idea, but hope springs eternal.

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h/t The A.V. Club