Simon Pegg Breaks Down His Career, from 'Shaun of the Dead' to 'Star Trek'

I kind of always thought it would be all right.

I thought I'd do okay.

I have a lot of self-belief.

By that, I don't mean arrogance,

but I feel like you have to have the courage

of your convictions in terms of what you want to do,

you have to believe it, and I sound

like a motivational speaker.

Hi, I'm Simon Pegg, and this is the timeline of my career.

[lively jazz piano music]

Tell us about everything.

Well, I believe that the films

Close Encounters of the Third Kind and RoboCop

both borrow heavily from my own life experiences.

I never thought at any point in my career

I would be speaking to Vanity Fair

about Six Pairs of Pants.

Six Pairs of Pants was a sketch show.

It wasn't even on national television in the U.K.,

it was on local television, and it was a comedy sketch show.

But it's where I met Jessica Hynes

and forged a relationship which would

carry me forward to Spaced and beyond,

so it was a very important show in that respect.

I think you can probably find bits of it on YouTube.

I hope not.

I'd come out of university and decided to do

stand-up as a way of having some autonomy

and not having to wait for the phone to ring.

And this comedy sketch show, they put an alert out

for stand-ups to come and audition for their show,

and my agent just sent me along and I got it.

It was just an audition, you know?

So I was a stand-up, but I wanted to get back into acting,

'cause that was kinda my first love.

I always wanted to be an actor, from when I was a kid,

and my mom was sort of into community theater

and I used to go along to it with her,

and I was in a load of shows when I was a kid.

And when I was about 15, I realized that I could

quite possibly do it as a career,

even though I was from essentially,

Tatooine, in terms of the town I was in.

But I didn't really set out necessarily

to be a comedy actor.

I wasn't like, I always wanted to be a comedy actor.

I wanted to do everything, you know.

[Interviewer] Right.

[someone wails in background] I think you're upset

about the house!

[Brian sighs]

Why would I be upset about the house?

This house is the one thing I can rely on,

it's the one port in a storm.

Yeah, Jess and I just sort of really

hit it off on Six Pairs of Pants.

We tried to do as many sketches as we could together.

She just made me laugh so much,

and that I always find that incredibly

sort of attractive in anyone.

I love people that make me laugh,

and Jess was just an expert at that.

And when we came to do a show

on the Paramount Comedy Channel called Asylum,

which Edgar Wright was directing,

there was a dearth of female actors in the show.

It was mainly stand-up comics,

and stand-up, like, sadly, many areas of everywhere,

was male-dominated.

And I knew a girl, I knew a girl

from Six Pairs of Pants who was brilliant,

and funnier than anybody else in the room,

and we should get her.

So Jess came along to do Asylum,

which was directed by Edgar.

And there was a producer working on Asylum

who was moving over to a different network

who had the idea of Jess and I having a vehicle

written for us to be in, because we worked

really well together in Asylum,

'cause we'd come off the back of our chemistry

on Six Pairs of Pants.

And Jess and I said, Yeah, we'd love that,

but can we write it?

And so we wrote Spaced, and we asked if Edgar

could direct it because we'd loved working with him

on Asylum, and that was how that little trio came about.

I look back on that time and think,

Man, we were so lucky.

We were that sort of naive and sure of ourselves,

And the people around us as well, the personnel

were all fairly young and they were sort of making roads

into network TV, and Jess and I just went,

Yeah, okay, but we want to write it.

That was our stipulation, like we had

any kind of wiggle room to negotiate.

but they were like, Sure, okay.

And along the whole way, for a long time,

it was just like, Sure, yeah, okay, yeah.

We were enabled.

I'd stepped into this world thinking,

Hey, everything just gets handed to you.

This is great.

It's not the case.

And I don't think Spaced would get made now.

It would be experimented on, on a deep network,

a digital satellite network somewhere,

before we even saw the light of the mainstream.

We just wanted to make something that really spoke to us,

but none of the programs leveled at 20-somethings

at the time really spoke to us in any way

on a personal level.

They were all very aspirational

and they were full of beautiful people.

As much as we loved Friends,

we wanted to make the anti-Friends

and have it be about what unemployed loser dropouts do.

And people seemed to respond to it, which was lovely.

Oh my God!

[zombie gasps]

She's so drunk!

[chuckles]

I wrote a scene in Spaced where Tim is playing

Resident Evil under the influence of amphetamines

and starts to live out the game,

which was just an excuse, really, to shoot a sequence

where I was jumping around killing zombies.

I think it was one of the first things that we shot.

Edgar really wanted to sort of lay out his stall

and show what kind of show we were making to the producers.

And we shot the sequence and we edited it together

and showed it and said this is the kind of thing

we were gonna do.

And I never forget the degree of pride

that I felt when Spaced aired,

just after Friends finished on Friday night at 9:30,

within minutes of Friends finishing,

of their being a sort of lovefest on the couch

at Central Perk, I blew off a zombie's head

on television and felt such a joy, a swell of pride.

And after shooting that sequence, Edgar and I

were like, Oh, it'd be great if we could make

a zombie film, wouldn't it?

Our own zombie film.

It could be about just us, you know,

like what would happen if it happened to us?

[laughs] And then that's how it was born.

It's a wonderful thing when you step

onto a film set of something you have written,

because you see your own imagination writ large,

you see your own imagination realized in places

and situations, and that's really, really amazing.

And so, to suddenly find ourselves

in the Winchester set, or walking around Crouch End

when it's literally teeming with zombies,

was an amazing thing, and it still is.

I didn't really think of where it was gonna be shown

or if it would get shown or whether it would

ever see the light of day in any other country

other than the U.K.

It was just, we were in the moment,

we're making our movie and not hobbled

by [laughs] the burden of expectation.

It was kind of, Let's just get this on DVD

and then we can give it to our moms and that'll be fun.

And then it came out in the U.K., and it was well received,

and then it started to get attention in the U.S.,

and George Romero saw it and a lot

of our favorite directors saw it,

and there was a little campaign to get

it a theatrical release, which it did.

And then we went out on tour, on a six-week tour

of the U.S., me and Edgar and Nick.

It was like being in a band.

It was amazing.

It was more like being in a band when we went back

with Hot Fuzz, 'cause people had liked our first album,

so then we felt like little indie rock stars.

Yeah, it was extraordinary.

I look back on it now and just think,

I'm glad I was that naive in a way.

Oh, no, no, I'm serious.

I've just come out of a relationship.

[Shaun yelps]

Benji, what do you got?

Well, these hard drive platters are just fried.

They just made a mess of them.

There's just holes in them and stuff,

and it's got scorched all the way through.

And then there's, look, this one's got

a hole in it and stuff.

I don't believe it, I can't even look at it.

Edgar and I were writing Hot Fuzz,

and the phone rang upstairs and we put the call through,

Oh, J.J. Abrams is on the phone.

I said, What, the 'Alias' man?

We had a chat and he'd said he'd liked Shaun of the Dead,

and he'd seen me and Edgar at the Saturn Awards,

but he said he [laughs] didn't have the guts

to come and say hello, which is hilarious to me

because J.J.'s the most gregarious, ebullient human being

you could ever meet.

But he said, Do you wanna come and do

a bit of 'Mission: Impossible III'?

And I said, Yeah, all right, why not?

And that was that.

It was a really odd.

And he said, I'm gonna send you, I've got this new show.

[laughs] This is great.

So I've just done this new show for ABC.

I'll send it to you.

And he sent me the whole of the first season

of Lost on individual DVDs,

I got this big box, and I binged the whole show

before it had even shown in the U.S.

And I just thought, Oh, this is amazing.

Because I'd seen episodes of Alias,

but I wasn't a regular viewer of the show.

But that was it. I was, Oh, this guy's brilliant.

I'll do this.

So I went over and did my little cameo

playing Tom Cruise's GPS.

And it was just that period of time

was a particularly rough patch,

And I found myself in L.A. and I didn't really know L.A.

I was in some hotel in Beverly Hills,

and I couldn't quite understand

how I couldn't walk anywhere.

I'd step out and I'd look up these long boulevards

like, Where the hell is the shops [laughs] and stuff?

What is this place?

This is bizarre.

So I wound up just stuck in this hotel room

for eight days waiting to be called,

as these big movies, sometimes,

the way they move, it's unpredictable,

and [inhales sharply] I was just sorta slowly going insane.

And I eventually got to set and I did my bit,

but I was totally wired and very jet-lagged,

and it was all very surreal.

It was very strange to be occupying a space

that I had kind of always dreamed of,

making a movie in Hollywood with one

of the biggest stars in the world,

probably the biggest star in the world,

and not to be enjoying it particularly.

But that all turned around with the next one, thankfully.

Well, however you spin this, there's one thing

you haven't taken into account.

And that's what the team is gonna make of this.

[air whooshes] [streamer pops]

I think we had the idea for Hot Fuzz

probably on the Shaun of the Dead press tour,

'cause that's when me and Edgar and Nick

would all be together and just spending time,

and I think Edgar had this, he really wanted

to go back to his hometown and blow it up.

And the idea of setting an American-style

action movie in a very, very sort of parochial,

bucolic British setting just sounded really funny to us.

We didn't intend to do anything but take it

absolutely seriously and play out all those

action sequences with utter, terminal intention,

but the fact that the context was so weird,

that would be where the comedy came from.

And that was the idea, to shoot Lethal Weapon in Somerset.

Shaun of the Dead was basically

kind of from my life, sort of.

I mean, it wasn't a huge stretch.

I didn't have to research being

a sort of pub-going lazy bastard.

But with Nicholas Angel, I had to get out there

and really understand what it means to be a police officer

in metropolitan London and also out in the sticks,

and that required doing a lot of ride-alongs

and research trips, and it was really good fun.

But I went into it with a greater knowledge of policing.

[flash clicks] The notion of transport

beaming is like trying to hit a bullet

with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold,

riding a horse.

What's that?

I got off an aeroplane, a flight from New York

back to London and opened my phone,

and there was an email from J.J., and it said,

Do you want to play Scotty?

And I was almost annoyed by that.

The tenacity of it irked me,

[laughs]

because you can't just throw the ball into my court

like that and expect me to smash it back.

I need some time to think about it.

But of course, three or four days later,

I was like, Yes, of course!

But it just felt like such a, he was just handing me

this massive opportunity, and I wanted dinner and a movie.

Oddly, when he offered me the role in Star Wars,

he did take me out to dinner and offer me over dinner.

So he's learning.

We laugh a lot, J.J. and I, when we're together.

We have horribly painful hysterics together.

I don't know what it is, we just set it off in each other.

And I just love his company.

He's such a can-do person and a sweet, sweet man.

And I owe him a lot, you know, in terms of my career,

and I'll never be able to thank him enough,

but he's a sweetheart.

It was my 50th birthday recently,

and my wife threw me a surprise party,

and he was there, and I was so chuffed,

'cause he flew over, especially, and it was

such a sweet thing, and yeah, I love him to pieces.

Yeah, that that's such a great gang.

I love those guys so much.

And I joined the first Star Trek fairly late.

They'd already got to know each other,

and I was joining a party that had been

in the swing for quite a while.

But they were so welcoming and I was just brought in

with open arms and became part of the gang,

and that only deepened with the subsequent films

And they're a family, in a way.

You know, that's corny, but we sort of forged

that relationship over those films,

and I love them very much.

It's just a weird thing sometimes, making films

or working in this business, because you forge

these incredibly intense, sometimes incredibly brief

relationships with people where you're all

in this one boat for a specific period of time,

all working on the same thing,

all working towards the same end,

and you see these people more than you see

your own family for however many,

whether it's 20 days or six months or whatever,

and then suddenly it ends.

You constantly suffer abandonment in this business,

'cause you, you make these really close,

close acquaintances and then suddenly they all disappear.

It's no wonder all actors are messed up.

But if you get the chance to work with that group

again and again, that's a real bonus.

And I always think a happy set is a productive set.

I don't like sets that feel overwrought

or difficult or actors that may,

I haven't come across many in my time,

but when I have, I've always thought,

[beep] do it, you know?

We're just making a film.

There's no need to just be such an ass.

I haven't said that to them to their face, obviously.

Well, maybe I did.

[bell dings]

Have you got any plans for dinner at all?

Tonight we will be partaking of a liquid repast

as we wend our way up with the Golden Mile.

Yeah, The World's End was probably the most personal

of all of the three Cornetto movies, as we call them,

and it's my favorite, really.

I think it's 'cause it's the most sort of grown-up.

It's probably the bleakest.

That character, Gary King, is just

one of my favorite characters I've ever played.

I love him. [laughs]

It's really fun to play complex characters

that are sort of not entirely revealing themselves,

that their surface is only a fragment

of who they are.

And with Gary, he's this really annoying,

[laughs] sort of relentlessly cheerful

kind of force of nature, but he's also a suicidal alcoholic,

and that, for me, was such a great gift of a role

because you can allow people, you see it

every now and again, before all the truth is revealed

in him, you see the cracks, and they're only small,

but it's really fun to play that kind of character.

And I have fondness for every character I play,

but I think Gary was just something special.

Again, it was that family vibe.

We felt like a sort of a rep company.

And we'd had Martin, Martin Freeman,

he kind of appears briefly in Shaun,

and then he's one of the police officers

at the beginning of Hot Fuzz,

and then he's one of the main characters

in The World's End, so when we wrote the film,

it was always Martin, Paddy, Eddie, Nick, and Simon.

We didn't write the character names, we wrote the actors,

'cause that's who we wanted it to be.

It helped us write those characters.

We will, in truth, be blind,

drunk!

Let me see here.

Mm, one half-portion.

Last week, they were a half-portion each.

What about the droid?

I remember getting the call that J.J. was doing Star Wars,

and initially I felt like, Oh, you've abandoned

us 'Star Trek' people.

He's gone off to the cooler, younger kids.

But obviously that was just a moment

of irrational jealousy. [laughs]

But then he took me out to dinner

and asked me if I wanted to play a blobfish.

And I said, Yeah, okay, sure.

And then I started going down to the set

and I got all my makeup design and met everybody,

and being around that set was just amazing for me

as a fan of Star Wars growing up,

'cause it felt very much like the Star Wars

I grew up with, and of course Carrie Fisher

was there, and Mark Hamill, and Harrison Ford,

and these are the people that I idolized as a kid,

and so, to get to be hanging out with them

was a real dream come true.

I had such a huge crush on Carrie Fisher when I was a kid.

She was my first sort of stirrings of romantic love

was for Carrie Fisher.

And I got to spend a little time with her.

We had a lovely day when we wandered

around the set of the Resistance base together,

arm in arm, and we were just [laughs] sort of chatting,

and I turned around, we were looking at each other,

and I was looking into her eyes and it was the same eyes.

Obviously, it sounds really obvious to say it,

but it was like I was looking into those eyes

that had so sort of captivated me as a kid.

And I said, I said, You know, I've always loved you.

And she grabbed my hand and looked

at my wedding ring and said, [beep] you.

[laughs]

It was the best day of my life.

We created something beautiful, Jim, but it's changed.

It's really not a game anymore.

Are we finished?

I liked how things were when they were.

I loved working for Steven.

He's just one of my all-time favorite filmmakers.

I just adore him.

And he's such great company as well,

because he's always happy to talk about his work,

and he doesn't crow about it,

it's not like it's all about him,

but if you bring stuff up, he'll chat,

and it's a wonderful thing to get to talk about

Close Encounters and Jaws and Raiders

with him and have him just tell stories

from behind the scenes and, and also

to get to just be directed by him.

He's a brilliant actors' director, Steven.

That's why he's the whole deal.

He knows the language of cinema,

he knows how to move the camera to create tension,

or sadness, or whatever, but he also knows

how to get the performances he needs from his actors.

One day on the set, he was shooting the Shining sequence

and he was in the set of Room 237,

and it was such a bizarre thing

because it's a little bit like when I was on Star Wars,

but this was almost more precise

in that we were on the set of a film

that had come out 40 years ago,

not least one that had been directed

by a very dear friend and mentor of his, Stanley Kubrick.

And I said to him, This must be weird, right?

I mean, you're on the set of 'The Shining,'

directing the woman in the bath.

And he said, Yeah, it's [beep] weird.

[laughs]

It was really, really cool.

And we're back to where we started.

[chains clank] [grunts]

So tell me, what happened to your dad?

Vaughn's a great guy, and he approached me

about Terminal, which was a film

we made in Budapest a few years back.

And I really liked the fact that it

was a group of essentially ADs,

people that have worked on film, a lot of them

have worked on the Harry Potter movies at Leavesden,

and sort of got themselves together

and made themselves a production company,

one of whom happened to be dating Margot Robbie,

and Margot was a big champion of the script.

And I just really liked the fact

that they were pulling themselves up by their bootstraps

and making a movie and not waiting

for someone else to make it for them.

They were just going for it.

I read the script and I liked it.

It was really chewy, it had a lot of dialogue,

a lot of one-on-one stuff,

and that was a real fun shoot.

And then Vaughn sent me the script for Inheritance,

which, again, felt like quite a theatrical piece.

It was very dialogue-heavy, a lot of two-handed stuff

with my character Morgan and the character of Lauren,

which Lily Collins played.

And it just felt like, Oh, let's do it again.

We had such a fun time in Budapest making 'Terminal,'

and this feels like a really chewy role,

and one that I might not get offered ordinarily.

I get offered roles depending on the stuff that I've done.

People know me generally for comedy

or being sort of a lighthearted character

in a big blockbuster, and that tends

to be what I get offered, which is why

I write a lot of my own stuff.

But this was a really different role.

This was the role of an incredibly morally ambiguous,

sinister, mysterious character who may or may not be

on the up-and-up, and I really relished

the opportunity to play Morgan.

Inheritance was the chance to really

chew the scenery and be a sort of ambiguous,

could be bad guy, could be good guy, you don't know.

[laughs]

The bizarre Domino Rally of coincidences

that have occurred in terms of my love of Star Trek

and being in Star Trek, and my love of Star Wars

and being in Star Wars, and getting to work

with Steven Spielberg, whose films I just ate up as a kid,

all those things, I just couldn't have wished

for a more wish-fulfillment-style career, really.

I feel very, very lucky, and I hope it continues.

I just want to work with good people.

That's the dream.