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When Simon Pegg was 12, he - like almost every child his age - watched ET.
Unlike most 12-year-olds, he noticed that in a scene where the diminutive
alien spotted a child dressed in a Yoda costume, John Williams’s score
briefly changed to echo his own theme from The Empire Strikes Back. “It was
never explained,” he says, leaning forward enthusiastically to underline his
point. “You just see Yoda and hear the music. I thought - my God, I get
that. He’s put Yoda’s music in because we’re seeing Yoda. I felt so clever
and satisfied that I’d been regarded as an intelligent human being by the
movie-maker. I wanted to engender that feeling in others and say, ‘I’m not
up here saying watch me, I’m saying come and do it with me.’ ” Twenty-five
years later, Pegg is in Hollywood, having just finished work on his latest
film, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, when he gets a call saying
Steven Spielberg would like to meet him.
So he trots over to the motion-capture set for the ET director’s latest
project - the first in a trilogy of Tintin movies. Motion-capture sets are
bizarre, empty places. The event has been shot and is held in a computerised
camera, which allows the director to swoop around the scene. As a result,
there is only a computer guy and Spielberg sitting there.
“Steven’s smoking a stogy, cap on head, like he’s always been since I was a
baby,” Pegg says, shaking his head in wonder. “I shook his hand and chatted
about films. He gave me the mo-cap [motion-capture] camera, and I had a play
around with it. Then he said, ‘Hey, maybe you and Nick Frost could play the
Thompson Twins.’ In Tintin. A Spielberg movie. To work with him is beyond ..
. ” He trails off, lost for words.
Life has been full of these pull-focus moments for Pegg recently. The
38-year-old keeps finding himself in incredible situations, cartwheeling
inside, but trying to act casual. In How to Lose Friends, for instance, Pegg
plays a fictionalised version of the British journalist Toby Young, whose
confessional of the same name charted his incredibly unsuccessful stint at
Vanity Fair in the late 1990s. The magazine’s infamous editor, Graydon
Carter, is played by Jeff Bridges, who, Pegg found, is pretty much like The
Dude, his unemployed LA slacker character from The Big Lebowski. Except when
he’s actually on set.
“He’s very focused and method on set,” Pegg says, leaning back on his sofa.
“He watches the monitor after takes, thinks about what he’s done, then goes
back and changes it - it’s brilliant to watch, but on the first day it was a
little intimidating. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Do you play
tablas?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got these tablas in my
trailer. I just bought them. Come over at lunchtime and we’ll play them.’
“So I went round to his trailer and, sure enough, he had these Indian drums,
and he was teaching me how to play them and make that bendy noise. I started
to play, and he picked up his guitar and started to strum along. I suddenly
realised I was in Jeff Bridges’s trailer, playing tabla, accompanying him on
guitar, and I just laughed out loud.”
In a way, it was that moment in ET - that switch in Williams’s score - that
put him at Jeff Bridges’s knee. In the late 1990s, he created Channel 4’s
cult sitcom Spaced with fellow comic Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) and with
long-time collaborator Edgar Wright directing. The trio deliberately set out
to pack the show with knowing references, loading it with elaborate bows to
Star Wars, Resident Evil, Close Encounters, The A-Team and Fight Club.
Spaced begat Shaun of the Dead, Wright and Pegg’s spoof romantic-comedy/zombie
movie, or rom-zom-com, which was a surprise sleeper hit in America in 2004
and has sold 1.3m DVDs Stateside. Variety quotes the unlikely statistic
that, according to the film’s distributor, Universal, 40% of American men
aged between 17 and 39 are fans of the film.
It also impressed a significant number of Hollywood power players: Quentin
Tarantino, David Schwimmer, Mission: Impossible III’s director, JJ Abrams,
and the comedy uber-producer Judd Apatow. Famously, Pegg dismissed the
success of Shaun of the Dead with the quip, “It’s not like I’m going to be
starring in Mission: Impossible III” - only to be cast as Benji in the movie
a few months later. He’s now mates with all of the above.
“It’s very collaborative out there,” he muses on Hollywood. “Edgar’s been
there all year. He’s living over Quentin Tarantino’s cinema at the moment.
It’s basically a ‘rise of the geek’ thing. The generation who are starting
to take over Hollywood are the people who grew up with video - loving film
and TV, and taping it and rewatching it, just like the Spaced lot and the
League of Gentlemen and the Mighty Boosh and Little Britain did. We all grew
up on the same stuff and we get the same references. It’s like - if you can
write and perform, then you’re in.”
Yet, despite Pegg’s magnanimous inclusive sweep across the British comedy
industry, it is hard to think of another homeboy who’s got it quite so good.
Sacha Baron Cohen, perhaps, and maybe Ricky Gervais: both have a healthy
cameo career and are working on Hollywood-backed movie projects for 2009.
What they haven’t yet got is a How to Lose Friends movie - a leading-man
role in a proper American-distributed popcorn flick, with a glam-orous
co-star (Kirsten Dunst) and someone else to write, produce and direct.
The result is edging Pegg towards a kind of 21st-century mix of Hugh Grant and
Richard Curtis. He still writes his own stuff - there is a road movie with
Nick Frost, Paul, out next year, and World’s End, the third in the
Wright/Pegg “blood and ice cream” trilogy that began with Shaun of the Dead
and led to Hot Fuzz, starts shooting soon - but after Run, Fat Boy, Run and
Lose Friends, he stands on the verge of becoming Britain’s leading romcom
hero.
In one sense, this is exceedingly unlikely. His cheerful, scruffy and
enthusiastic on-screen characters are very close to the man himself –
although the real-life Pegg is more inclined to discuss the politics of
cinema or the essence of love songs than his gut-scratching alter egos.
He doesn’t have Brad Pitt’s abs, Daniel Craig’s jaw or Johnny Depp’s smoulder.
He is an everyman with dreams - letting men think that they, too, might kiss
Kirsten Dunst while allowing their girlfriends to believe the slob beside
them might yet shape up.
Creating such dreams is a fitting role for the son of two dreamers. Pegg was
born in Gloucester to a piano-salesman father who wanted to be a musician
and a tax-office civil-servant mother who was passionate about amateur
dramatics. His parents separated when he was seven, his mother moving with
Pegg and his sister to a village that had an arcane trust bequeathed by an
earnest noblewoman “to send children to places of artistic education”.
“Mum applied for the grant for me to go to a theatre-studies college in
Stratford-upon-Avon when I was 16. She loved acting so much, but the idea of
doing it professionally wasn’t an option for her as a young girl in
Gloucester. So she scraped the money together and did everything she could
to let me do it.” He is visibly moved as he retells this, though he is quick
to add that his father was incredibly supportive too. Indeed, he got his
parents and his sister roles in Shaun of the Dead - though, after chatting
to Jon Voight at an LA premiere, it was his mother he called to share his
excitement.
From Stratford, Pegg went to Bristol to study drama on an intensely
theoretical course - his thesis was “A Marxist overview of popular Seventies
cinema and hegemonic discourses”. It was there that he decided to take
control of his own means of production. “The course was of such an
analytical nature that it gave you this state-of-the-art overview of the
culture in the nation,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be
part of that “buffeted by agents” thing. maybe I want to be able to create
something for myself’.”
As for the romcom thing - well, Pegg brought it on himself. Spaced had a “will
they, won’t they?” element. He argues that Shaun of the Dead was a spoof
romantic comedy, rather than a spoof horror film, and that Hot Fuzz was
“deliberately taking on that guy-love homoerotic subtext most action films
have, because I have a fairly romantic relationship with Nick - he’s my best
friend and I love him very much - but also because there are some
hilariously homoerotic moments in action cinema. Not least Danny Glover
cradling the stripped-to-the-waist Mel Gibson in the rain at the end of
Lethal Weapon, saying, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you’ ”.
He pauses to wonder why this is so. “I think,” he concludes, “the struggle for
love is almost more powerful than the fight for freedom or against evil.”
Pegg has won this particular struggle. In 2005, he married his long-time
girlfriend, Maureen McCann, who used to work in the music industry, but is
now his manager. They came up with the arrangement to spend more time
together, but when I mention children, he laughs and says: “We have a dog.”
He is also keen to stay in Crouch End, north London, despite Hollywood’s
embrace. “LA can be the most exciting place on earth and it can be the
darkest, loneliest place ever,” he explains. “If you’ve got nothing to do,
there’s just these big empty wide streets that go on for miles. . . ” He
shivers. And, for a moment, you can almost hear that Williams theme from ET,
the story of a traveller whose adventure gets a bit too big and who just
wants to go home.
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People will be released on October 3
