As Simon Pegg reminds me, 20 years ago he was on the set of his breakout movie, Shaun of the Dead. Today he’s packing his bags for Rome, the first stop on a promotional tour for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh film in Hollywood’s most dependable franchise.
“The way it’s happened to me, it’s been sort of fairly linear and logical,” says Pegg of his unlikely status as a Hollywood player. “I know it looks pretty weird from the outside. I try to keep that sense of gratitude and wonder. It’s a fantastic little story. I know where I came from. But at the same time, I think I’ve worked really hard and I never, ever feel like I shouldn’t be here.”
It certainly is a fantastic little story.
Pegg was already a stand-up comic and TV regular in the late 1990s when he developed Spaced, a Brit slacker sitcom created by and starring Pegg and Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes). He had previously been nominated for a British Comedy Award for his work on the Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan sketch show Big Train; he played music journalist Paul Morley in Factory Records saga 24-Hour Party People; and was the butt of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s jokes in Guest House Paradiso.
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Inspired by a Resident Evil fever dream episode of Spaced, Pegg and fellow pop culture curator Edgar Wright wrote a zombie comedy script over some eight weeks. They relied on fans of Spaced to help staff the zombie invasion. They also had to write a nice letter to Brian May to clear the rights for Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
May said yes and Shaun of the Dead went on to take $30 million at the box office, acting as a harbinger for the incoming vogue for all things zombie, and winning over celebrity fans Steven King and George Romero. The latter asked Pegg to cameo in his 2004 postapocalyptic thriller, Land of the Dead. Inspired international filmmakers responded with feature-length tributes, including Juan of the Dead from Cuba and Hsien of the Dead from Singapore.
In the months after Shaun’s 2004 release, Pegg and Wright were asked if they were relocating to Hollywood, to which the actor famously replied: “It’s not like we’re going to go away and do, I don’t know, Mission: Impossible 3.”
Within a year, Mission: Impossible 3 director JJ Abrams announced that Pegg had been cast as Tom Cruise’s techie sidekick, Benji, in the spy caper.
The call transformed Simon Pegg from the co-writer and star of movies such as Paul into a movie star. The 53-year-old, a regular in both the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek franchises, is a port of call for Abrams, who cast him as Scotty and signed him up to play junk dealer Unkar Plutt for rival space film Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
He voiced headmaster Phineas Nigellus Black in Hogwarts Legacy, and Buck, the one-eyed, dinosaur-hunting weasel, in the three most recent Ice Age movies.
It’s not just the CV. Pegg has A-list chums. Tom Cruise calls him “Eight Pack Peggles”. He’s godfather to Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple and has played harmonica and tambourine with Coldplay. (His daughter Tilly, with intergenerational neatness, has sung backing vocals for the same band at Glastonbury.) He is chummy with Friends alumnus David Schwimmer, who directed him in Run, Fatboy Run. When Pegg was treated for alcoholism and depression, tabloid journalists called the clinic where he was recovering and pretended to be his mother.
And yet, he remains an unrivalled every-bloke. Not a blokey bloke, to be clear, just “a regular sort of person”, as he puts it.
Back in 2006, just ahead of the Irish premiere of Hot Fuzz, Pegg lamented that: “It’s hard for straight men to love other men.” In that spirit, he and his frequent collaborator and best pal, Nick Frost, shared a single bed during their early, impoverished days in London. They remain firm friends.
“We’ve taken to communicating through memes on Instagram,” says Pegg, of Frost. “But they have to be a certain kind of meme. We specialise in memes that think they’re really funny but actually aren’t. And then we’ll both pretend that we find it hilarious. He’s my first thought for bad memes and always will be. It would be really weird If I went for a few days without hearing from Nick.”
[ Simon Pegg and Nick Frost give coronavirus advice in Shaun of the Dead spoofOpens in new window ]
Pegg is similarly loyal to his Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise. During an interview on BBC’s Desert Island Discs, the actor politely batted away a question about Cruise’s ties to Scientology, noting that he never asks Tom about his “personal beliefs” because “that would be me abusing [the] privileged access that I get to him”.
“I’m obviously incredibly grateful to Tom because it was also his decision to reach out to me in the first place,” says Pegg. “We were talking the other day, saying that we’ve been making these films together for 17 years. And it’s amazing to be part of such an incredible team. I’m a movie fan and I get to hang out with Ving Rhames, who will always be Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction to me. I love hanging out with such a cool dude. And then, Rebecca Ferguson is like a sister to me. We’ve become so close over the course of the last three films that she’s one of my best mates. That’s a lovely thing to be able to go to work with people you love. When the four of us get together – me, Tom, Ving, and Rebecca – we constantly make each other laugh. We have to be told to behave.”
I’ve aged out of the things I used to obsess over. It was pretty cool at the time but it doesn’t f**king matter. I see people getting furious online over ephemera when there’s real sh*t happening in the world
The enduring popularity of the $3.57 billion-and-counting franchise is at least in part down to Cruise’s insistence on stunt work over green screen and CG chicanery. Much was made of Dead Reckoning’s proposed destruction of the Pilchowickie Bridge during production, a stunt sequence that created a stand-off between locals, director Christopher McQuarrie, and Poland’s deputy culture minister, Pawel Lewandowski. (The scene was finally shot at a quarry in Derbyshire, the same site used for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s breakneck opener.)
Verisimilitude has ever been a watchword for Mission: Impossible. To date, Cruise has hung by his fingernails from the side of a cliff in Utah; tumbled down the side of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building; driven a motorcycle backwards around the Arc de Triomphe during rush hour; and clung on to a cargo plane in flight over Belarus.
Dead Reckoning Part One sees the Top Gun star riding a bike off a cliff and free-falling.
“The films have been incredibly resistant to entropy,” says Pegg. “This franchise seems to get better as it goes on, which is a very rare thing.”
Pegg, too, has acquired an acumen for derring-do even if he’s not yet climbing a rope dangling from a helicopter, as Cruise managed for Mission: Impossible 6.
[ Simon Pegg: I was an ‘unhappy alcoholic’ during the Mission Impossible filmsOpens in new window ]
“I’m always learning something new with every movie,” says Pegg. “On the new one, I was literally thrown into the Grand Canal in Venice. I had to learn how to drive through very narrow canals. I’d done a little bit of speedboat driving for Fallout, so I was okay; it wasn’t a complete baptism of fire. But I also learned to do underwater work, practising breathing, and a little bit of scuba. You’re constantly learning new technical jargon, too.”
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One has not been an easy ride. Early in 2019 Cruise announced the seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible films would be shot back to back, only for the production to be derailed by Covid in early 2020. When production resumed in December of that year, an audio recording featuring a stressed Cruise surfaced. “I don’t ever want to see it again, ever,” Cruise told a group of people he found standing around a computer, in an apparent breach of Covid protocols: “You can tell it to the people that are losing their f**king homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education.”
“Tom leads the charge from the head,” says Pegg. “He’s such a generous and enthusiastic person. And it rubs off on all of us. This was a gargantuan undertaking, And we haven’t finished. It’s ongoing. And it was made all the more gargantuan by the practicalities of trying to make a film of this scale, in the middle of a global pandemic. We were constantly battling the practicalities of shooting during Covid. That led to delays because it was hard to plan and lock anything down. In a normal kind of filmmaking environment, it would be a mammoth task to make these films. It’s such a testament to our crew, to everyone involved in the film, that we held it together. There’s a great sense of pride in getting it done. Because we had to write the rule book as we went along. Nobody knew how to do this. We invented and tested the protocols, of putting people into bubbles, that other films have followed. It was frustrating in some respects, because of the pandemic, because we occasionally had to stop shooting. And, when you’re sat at home, twiddling your thumbs, it’s annoying, because you just want to be on set and having fun.”
Simon Beckingham, as it says on his birth certificate, was born in Gloucester to Gillian Rosemary, a civil servant, and John Henry Beckingham, a jazz musician. His parents separated when he was seven and he began using Pegg, his stepfather’s surname, after his mother remarried. He credits his mum with his early interest in the performing arts and an early stage role.
“It was mum’s love of drama and her involvement in the local drama group in Gloucester that really brought me into acting,” says Pegg. “I was in a production at King’s School, Gloucester. It’s a very beautiful cathedral school where they shot Harry Potter. I had to leave before I finished because we couldn’t afford it. But I did a performance in the chapel there, playing the very young St Francis of Assisi. I remember the scene. My dad came into the room. And I had to say: hello, father. I said it very loudly and it echoed. And then he gave me a little box of sweets, I sat on his lap and I could see all the kids in the front row whispering my line while I sat there and finished the entire box.”
Pegg studied English literature and theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon College. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Bristol where he formed the comedy troupe David Icke and the Orphans of Jesus with future television stars David Walliams, Dominik Diamond and Jason Bradbury. He can still give you the Gramscian gist of his undergraduate thesis: a Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses.
“It was based on the Marxist idea of consent,” says Pegg. “Being that, if you consume or watch a film, and it’s racist, and you don’t critically objectify yourself from that, then you are being racist. It was all about how we consent to certain ideas in popular culture. There was a lot of stuff in there about the nuclear threat of that era, our relationship with LGBTQ people, and racial stereotypes. A character like Chewbacca is basically a proxy for the Polish gunner on a warplane. He is marginalised in the same way that non-whites or non-American characters would be in a non-sci-fi movie. It was really fun to pick apart those films because I love them. I could love them and still see where the shortcomings are.”
It disappoints me when people ask for sequels. It’s a story, it has a beginning, a middle and an end that doesn’t need to be continued
Pegg has been disarmingly honest about his struggles with depression and alcoholism, which he hid during the production of Mission: Impossible 3. He sought treatment ahead of the production of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, so the films, he says “Are a kind of map of the journey”.
His private life, however, has remained just that. He married his long-time girlfriend, Maureen McCann, in 2005. They live quietly in Hertfordshire with their teenage daughter, Matilda, or Tilly.
“I think it’s important to be grounded,” he says. “I’m very much a homebody. And as much as I enjoy travelling – and I’m very lucky in my work to travel a lot – I’m at my happiest when I’m with my family. I’m not having any FOMO when I’m having Sunday dinner at home.”
Back in 2018, during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Pegg cheerfully suggested that he had completed the “ultimate nerd hat-trick” by appearing in Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek. He remains hopeful that the stalled Star Trek movie franchise might yet be revived: “If it doesn’t happen, I’ll be disappointed,” he says. “It’s not off the table.” A new instalment in Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy – the triumvirate of films comprising Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End – is not on the cards.
“We’re not going to make another Cornetto film [the trilogy that comprises Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End],” he says. “It won’t fit the criteria that we had for those films, in that it won’t be a take on a genre. We’re done with the key criteria that shaped the trilogy. Whatever Edgar and I do next, and we will do something, we want to do something that surprises people. At this stage in my career, I feel you have to give people what they need and not what they want. It disappoints me when people ask for sequels. It’s a story, it has a beginning, a middle and an end that doesn’t need to be continued. And it can also be damaging retroactively to add to something that doesn’t need an addition.”
Pegg, who called his 2009 biography Nerd Do Well, insists that he has moved on from the fan culture that shaped Spaced and the Cornetto trilogy.
“I’ve aged out of the things I used to obsess over,” he says. “It was pretty cool at the time but it doesn’t f**king matter. I see people getting furious online over ephemera when there’s real shit happening in the world. We’re at a tipping point, ecologically, politically and socially, and people are getting upset because so and so isn’t playing Spider-Man, or whatever. And because social media has killed all nuance, it’s all binary and noisy and inelegant and ridiculous.”
Against that, Pegg remains a genuine movie fan, one who has raised another genuine movie fan.
“Tilly is only 14 but she’s even more of a movie buff than I was at her age,” says Pegg. “She has lined up Seven Samurai and Vertigo for tonight, which is brilliant and joyous for me because I get this vicarious thrill of sitting down with her and experiencing a movie through her eyes. She’s so smart. We watched One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest the other night and she immediately wanted to rewatch the little pastiche we did in Spaced so she could get all the references.”
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas from July 10th
