Everybody’s so plugged into being a child, you know?” Because no one will grow the fuck up any more. “This culture of infantilised adulthood, all these grown-ass men arguing about fucking superheroes online, and meanwhile the world is falling apart in so many different ways,” he says. Pegg has come to look at nostalgia as almost “a neurological disorder” that makes us resistant to change. ![]() The changes have been more profound than film choices. Now if I get offered comedies I turn them down, because I want to do it with Edgar and nobody else.” Comedy was just something I enjoyed and seemed to be able to do. “I made a name for myself as a comedic actor, but I’d quite like to flex different muscles. “I say no to a lot of things,” says Pegg, in the garden of a grand house in Hertfordshire (not his) that is the backdrop for the photographs on these pages. Pegg knows he no longer has to write parts to be asked – often by his boyhood heroes – to act in them: he’s been Scotty in three Star Trek films, appeared in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Steven Spielberg cast him as one of the Thompson Twins in The Adventures of Tintin. ![]() He’s teetotal and in confoundingly good nick: Tom Cruise once called him “Eight-Pack Peggles.” Yes, Tom Cruise, he’s a pal, the pair having worked together for more than 15 years on the Mission: Impossible series, the seventh installment of which, Dead Reckoning, Part One, is the reason we are here today. He’s 53 now and lives with his wife, Mo, and their teenage daughter, Tilly, in a house surrounded by fields. Pegg drank a bit too much and had a slightly chaotic life so did his characters.īut Pegg, these days, is very different. He lived in flatshares in north London and had been obsessed since childhood with sci-fi, zombies, video games and action movies, and all these elements found their way into the scripts. He wrote Spaced and Shaun of the Dead in his late 20s and early 30s because he believed – probably accurately – that the only way to snag the acting roles he wanted in first TV then films was to create those parts himself. Pegg is sort-of joking, but also sort-of-very-much not. View image in fullscreen Just cruising: with Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson in a scene from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part One (2023). Well, two now, but I had three then, and they’re quite well-behaved. “I have three dogs they are schnauzers, too. “Edgar bought his dog, Peter, and Peter was very distracting,” he replies, in his West Country-inflected half-drawl. ![]() Was it the pressure of following those previous iconic films? Pegg shakes his head. ![]() (The pair also created Spaced, one of the all-time great sitcoms, which Pegg wrote and starred in with Jessica Hynes.) But progress on film number four, Pegg admits, wrinkling his nose, was slow. Their previous three, aka the Cornetto Trilogy – Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World’s End (2013) – are all standards on any list of the best British films of the 21st century, and have made both Pegg and Wright bona-fide Hollywood heavyweights. Last summer, the actor and writer Simon Pegg and the writer-director Edgar Wright holed up for a week at Pegg’s home in Hertfordshire to see if they could break ground on a fourth feature film together.
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