IPOD
RADIO
Simon Pegg
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Apr 16, 2007
It’s 2007 and Simon Pegg has become a bonafide movie star. Pegg’s breakout role in the surprise cult hit Shaun of the Dead has led to bigger roles such as the lab tech in Mission: Impossible III and the lead in the Run, Fat Boy, Run written by Michael Ian Black. But Hot Fuzz is the film that Pegg and his long time collaborator, director Edgar Wright, have wanted to do since they wrapped Shaun. Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorite films of recent years but Hot Fuzz surpasses it in acting, humor and technically the film is a marvel. Wright and Pegg have crafted a tight screenplay that lovingly satirizes elements from some of the best/worst action films of all time. Amazingly they’ve incorporated those ideas into pivotal and often emotional scenes. In Hot Fuzz, Pegg plays super cop Nicholas Angel, who does such a good job of arresting bad guys that he is making his department pale in comparison. He is then transferred to the rural sleepy hamlet of Sandford. At first he spends his time trying to whip the lazy police department into shape but soon Angel realizes that Sandford is hiding a dark secret.
Hot Fuzz opens April 20
Daniel Robert Epstein: The first interview we did for Shaun of the Dead was in a pub. Then for Shaun DVD we talked in another bar. Now we are talking about Hot Fuzz in the police museum.
Simon Pegg: Absolutely. It’s quite alarming isn’t it?
DRE:
[laughs] It looks like you went all method for the role. You even had neck muscles.
Pegg:
I did. I felt like I had to work out for the role. I didn’t really want it to be a joke. The serious element of a lot of what we do is very important. In Shaun of the Dead when people started dying, the characters were reacting as they should. In this I wanted Nicholas Angel to be absolutely convincing as a super cop.
DRE:
I read you hurt yourself quite a bit making Hot Fuzz.
Pegg:
Daily, it was comic in a way. There were so many injuries on set. Fortunately it was a low level curse. It was like The Omen but there were only cuts and bruises. A lot of people that weren’t even on camera ended up injured. One of the grips fell down the stairs and broke his rib. Our wardrobe designer fell out of the truck and banged her leg. One of the facilities guys broke his glasses and snapped the top of his nose. I just got strained quad muscles and I lost various segments of skin here from jumping over things. The thing is, I was so charged up, I was so in the moment that when I was filming the scene where I’m chasing the shoplifter down the street and he runs in front of a 4X4 and I jump over the bonnet. In one of the takes I put my knee into the side of it but I just kept on going. When we went back for the next take we saw a massive dent in the car. It was like that scene in Smallville where he stops the bus with his hand and leaves a handprint in it. I was really firing on all cylinders with this. I can dent the hard part of a 4X4 and not feel it.
DRE:
My favorite stuff in the movie is all the cross-cutting and the juxtaposition. Is all of that in script?
Pegg:
Absolutely, we’re very meticulous when we write. We love transitions. A great way to knit a film together is with interesting transitions and obviously verbal ones are great fun to do. Often somebody will say something and the next thing you see will have relevance to that or whatever. Edgar is also able to do some of that in the edit as well, in terms of having everything in front of him and essentially is able to do another draft of the script. We’re very particular the way we do that. That’s why there’s very little, if any, improvisation on set. We have the script written in stone before we begin.
DRE:
Obviously you guys take a couple things out of other movies like Point Break when Nick [Frost] is shooting the gun up in the air, which is done completely serious. Is it difficult to take those conventions and put them in a movie without making it a parody?
Pegg:
I think the key to that is to not to come at it with anything other than love. The minute you dislike your source material that’s when you start parodying and parodying with a sneer as well. Anything in Hot Fuzz that we might parody like for instance the never ending bullets in a gun or some of the more the more ridiculous beats of the action sequences is all done with a huge amount of affection so it’ll never come across as anything other than a tribute because that’s what it is. Look at Mel Brooks as a film director, his best movies are when he was sending up films that he loved like westerns or Universal horror movies. You can see he didn’t particularly like Star Wars or Robin Hood and that’s why those movies aren’t near as good. I think it’s always healthy to have affection for the source material you’re tackling.
DRE:
I love the scene where you and Nick are shooting up the tiny English village. It reminded me a scene from another film of yours, Mission: Impossible III, where Tom Cruise is running really quickly through that ancient Chinese village. There’s all this insanity going around a place where that really shouldn’t be happening.
Pegg:
Let’s not forget I was guiding Tom through that little Chinese village on the other end of the phone. But that’s the central joke of Hot Fuzz. We’ve taken two things that shouldn’t really be together and put them together. Essentially that’s the structure of every joke, you juxtapose any two categories that shouldn’t necessarily be in the same place, a duck walks into a bar kind of thing. The incongruity of it was a whole part of the comedy.
DRE:
What’s it like upping your game with all those great actors like Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent?
Pegg:
It’s nothing but good for you. As soon as you walk on set and you look around you and you see these people who you’ve grown up watching or you have massive respect for, you have to step up. You have to play you’re A game otherwise you’re just going to disappear. People like Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw are utter professionals and do nothing but brilliant stuff. So it’s the best environment for any actor. Look at [Sylvester] Stallone in Copland. He really raises his game. I think Stallone is a great actor. A lot of the time he’s in action fare which demands less of him as an actor. But when you surround yourself with great actors it brings out the best in you.
DRE:
I know that at least up until Eraser, Arnold Schwarzenegger would bring in his own writer to write his one liners. They never got credit because it was literally just a few lines. Did you guys spend a lot of time coming up with the one liners in Hot Fuzz?
Pegg:
I think the people that were brought in to write Arnold Schwarzenegger’s one liners must have had the easiest job on earth because all you do is come up with the most leaden pun for whatever’s just happened. Then deliver it in a slightly smug way. You just draw on those movies when you’re trying to think of those lines like “Cool off.” A friend of mine told me that when someone lands in the freezer during the supermarket scene I should have said “Rest in peas,” which I thought was very good. But they are fun!
DRE:
My eyeglasses have transition lenses so they turn into sunglasses in the sun. Sometimes, after they turn into sunglasses, I look at my reflection and feel cool. But in Hot Fuzz you get to play the coolest cop with the awesomest sunglasses.
Pegg:
Yeah, it’s fun to be a writer/actor and be able to write yourself parts like that. You get a little wish fulfillment because as you’re writing jumps through the air, firing two guns at once Hong Kong style you’re thinking, “I’m going to be doing that in a few months.” So it’s great fun to write yourself a part. Basically Edgar and me write the films that we want to see. We write the films that we don’t usually get to see or make in the UK so obviously there’s going to be a little bit of making ourselves look great in it.
DRE:
It is funny to read reviews of Hot Fuzz and see people pick the wrong movies you guys are referencing. Someone wrote that the scene where you are loading up with guys was reminiscent of Neo in The Matrix. But that is obviously Rambo.
Pegg:
Oh absolutely, it was more like The Wild Bunch or the commando scene in Commando. If you look at Wikipedia there’s a list of so-called references in Hot Fuzz which are virtually all wrong. There aren’t that many that we actually made specifically. The load up scene is a great example. Somebody said to Edgar, “That line when Angel says, I’m going to bust this thing wide open, what’s that from?” Edgar said, “It’s from everything.” It’s a much broader palette than Shaun of the Dead was.
DRE:
Do you look at it as a postmodern action film?
Pegg:
I guess so, since it’s self-referential so it’s now drawing attention to itself. Postmodernism is all about the recognition of self and using that as a creative start point. The film is very much self-reflective. It’s taking on the conventions and the themes and the clichés of a lot of other films and drawing attention to them so in that sense it is postmodern. But I think postmodernism is almost a condition as much as a decision. You almost can’t help it these days.
DRE:
I read all sorts of different things about your acting training. That you may be a method actor, is that true?
Pegg:
I’m not a method actor by any means. I guess method acting suits some people. To me, acting is acting is acting. [Laurence] Olivier said it once to Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man, “Act, dear boy.” I went to university to study theater, film and television so I have formal training in the arts but I became a standup comic and cut my teeth there.
DRE:
I was lucky enough to interview Woody Allen a few years ago and I asked him if he would ever do standup again. He said that he would like to but it takes so much time to build a set. Would you do standup again?
Pegg:
Yeah, I would. I did a couple of gigs recently in the UK and really enjoyed being back on stage. It’s a very immediate form of performance because you’re validated there and then. The minute the joke leaves your mouth they either laugh or they don’t. It’s not like you’re waiting for the edit. For that reason it’s extremely exhilarating but I think Woody Allen is right. Not only do you have to build the set, you have to work it through in safe environments until you’re natural and then take it out to the clubs. I might do a live show but I don’t know. I certainly would enjoy it. I really look back on those days fondly.
DRE:
The first time we spoke I asked you if read The Walking Dead and you said you do. After that got printed I know that you and [Walking Dead creator] Robert Kirkman became internet buddies.
Pegg:
That’s right. Now he sends me the new issues via PDF.
DRE:
So do you want to do a shout out to any cop or crime comics like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal?
Pegg:
Ed Brubaker gave that to me. He’s friends with Robert [Kirkman]. They were in Seattle. Robert emailed me and said, “My friend Ed is in town, can he come to the movie?” I said, “Absolutely. Of course.” He gave us Criminal and Nick [Frost] read it and said it’s fantastic. I’m going to read it on the flight to Toronto because I want to really read a good comic. Another comic I picked up at St. Mark's Comics a couple of weeks ago was Zombies vs. Robots. Chris Ryall wrote it and he also wrote the Shaun of the Dead comic book adaptation.
DRE:
I read a quote from you on the IMDB, which is always…
Pegg:
Sketchy, yeah.
DRE:
Yeah. I read that you turned down the role of Rorschach in Watchmen because it would become too "Simon Pegg IS Rorschach."
Pegg:
That is just so not true. I don’t even know what that means. I floated that I’d like to play Rorschach because I think he’s a great character. Also I’m ginger and funny looking. I think he’ll be fun to play. It’s funny when you read those things because they get put out there as fact. On the IMDB my agent keep taking off The Triviata as one of our projects. That was a sitcom that Nick and I were working on about three years ago. We shelved it because things really took off with the movies. Someone keeps putting it back on there and it’s like, “No, I’m not doing it anymore.” But the reason that is, is because some tabloid paper in the UK broke it as if I said we were doing it but that just wasn’t true. It seems like an odd story to make up.
DRE:
But you didn’t turn down Rorschach flat.
Pegg:
No, I was never offered it. I think when it was in the hands of Paul Greengrass I had a better chance at maybe getting a casting because I know Paul and would have put my case across. But now that it is with [300 director] Zack Snyder, he’s going to have his own choices, but I think he’d be a fun guy to work with.
DRE:
Have you seen any Shaun of the Dead tattoos on anybody?
Pegg:
I have. It’s cool and immensely flattering. A girl in Seattle named Wendy. She’s sexy and cool and has tattoos. Her tattoo is the cover of issue four of the Shaun of the Dead comic. But the weird thing is that maybe two months prior at a Virgin Megastore this guy showed me his tattoo based on the same image.
DRE:
You should get them together.
Pegg:
I said we should get them together, it’s a match made in heaven.
DRE:
Hot Fuzz is already doing so well overseas. Are you and Edgar planning on doing something together sooner rather than later?
Pegg:
The trouble is since Shaun of the Dead did so well a couple of projects have come up for both of us that we are now committed to. Edgar’s working with Marvel on Ant-Man which I might be involved in somewhat. Nick and I writing a project together, which we hope to film here in America maybe towards the end of this year or the beginning of next. But as Edgar and I touched down in Sydney for our Australian leg of our press tour we had this idea for the third film, which we’re very excited about. So as soon as we clear the decks we’ll get on with it and I think it’s going to be good.
DRE:
Would you want to play Ant-Man?
Pegg:
I think it’s important for Edgar to do a film that I’m not the lead character in. Though I think it would be fun. I haven’t read his script yet but I know it’s going to be really good. In the same way that we made the British bobbie into a bad ass, he’s effectively taken the smallest Marvel character and I have no doubt he’ll make it one of the best.
DRE:
Any Marvel characters you would like to play in a movie?
Pegg:
Probably Captain Britain [laughs].
DRE:
[laughs] With the flag on his face, chest and back.
Pegg:
I used to read Captain Britain when I was a kid. If they make a Captain Britain movie, there’s only one choice.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
It’s 2007 and Simon Pegg has become a bonafide movie star. Pegg’s breakout role in the surprise cult hit Shaun of the Dead has led to bigger roles such as the lab tech in Mission: Impossible III and the lead in the Run, Fat Boy, Run written by Michael Ian Black. But Hot Fuzz is the film that Pegg and his long time collaborator, director Edgar Wright, have wanted to do since they wrapped Shaun. Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorite films of recent years but Hot Fuzz surpasses it in acting, humor and technically the film is a marvel. Wright and Pegg have crafted a tight screenplay that lovingly satirizes elements from some of the best/worst action films of all time. Amazingly they’ve incorporated those ideas into pivotal and often emotional scenes. In Hot Fuzz, Pegg plays super cop Nicholas Angel, who does such a good job of arresting bad guys that he is making his department pale in comparison. He is then transferred to the rural sleepy hamlet of Sandford. At first he spends his time trying to whip the lazy police department into shape but soon Angel realizes that Sandford is hiding a dark secret.
Hot Fuzz opens April 20
Daniel Robert Epstein: The first interview we did for Shaun of the Dead was in a pub. Then for Shaun DVD we talked in another bar. Now we are talking about Hot Fuzz in the police museum.
Simon Pegg: Absolutely. It’s quite alarming isn’t it?
DRE:
[laughs] It looks like you went all method for the role. You even had neck muscles.
Pegg:
I did. I felt like I had to work out for the role. I didn’t really want it to be a joke. The serious element of a lot of what we do is very important. In Shaun of the Dead when people started dying, the characters were reacting as they should. In this I wanted Nicholas Angel to be absolutely convincing as a super cop.
DRE:
I read you hurt yourself quite a bit making Hot Fuzz.
Pegg:
Daily, it was comic in a way. There were so many injuries on set. Fortunately it was a low level curse. It was like The Omen but there were only cuts and bruises. A lot of people that weren’t even on camera ended up injured. One of the grips fell down the stairs and broke his rib. Our wardrobe designer fell out of the truck and banged her leg. One of the facilities guys broke his glasses and snapped the top of his nose. I just got strained quad muscles and I lost various segments of skin here from jumping over things. The thing is, I was so charged up, I was so in the moment that when I was filming the scene where I’m chasing the shoplifter down the street and he runs in front of a 4X4 and I jump over the bonnet. In one of the takes I put my knee into the side of it but I just kept on going. When we went back for the next take we saw a massive dent in the car. It was like that scene in Smallville where he stops the bus with his hand and leaves a handprint in it. I was really firing on all cylinders with this. I can dent the hard part of a 4X4 and not feel it.
DRE:
My favorite stuff in the movie is all the cross-cutting and the juxtaposition. Is all of that in script?
Pegg:
Absolutely, we’re very meticulous when we write. We love transitions. A great way to knit a film together is with interesting transitions and obviously verbal ones are great fun to do. Often somebody will say something and the next thing you see will have relevance to that or whatever. Edgar is also able to do some of that in the edit as well, in terms of having everything in front of him and essentially is able to do another draft of the script. We’re very particular the way we do that. That’s why there’s very little, if any, improvisation on set. We have the script written in stone before we begin.
DRE:
Obviously you guys take a couple things out of other movies like Point Break when Nick [Frost] is shooting the gun up in the air, which is done completely serious. Is it difficult to take those conventions and put them in a movie without making it a parody?
Pegg:
I think the key to that is to not to come at it with anything other than love. The minute you dislike your source material that’s when you start parodying and parodying with a sneer as well. Anything in Hot Fuzz that we might parody like for instance the never ending bullets in a gun or some of the more the more ridiculous beats of the action sequences is all done with a huge amount of affection so it’ll never come across as anything other than a tribute because that’s what it is. Look at Mel Brooks as a film director, his best movies are when he was sending up films that he loved like westerns or Universal horror movies. You can see he didn’t particularly like Star Wars or Robin Hood and that’s why those movies aren’t near as good. I think it’s always healthy to have affection for the source material you’re tackling.
DRE:
I love the scene where you and Nick are shooting up the tiny English village. It reminded me a scene from another film of yours, Mission: Impossible III, where Tom Cruise is running really quickly through that ancient Chinese village. There’s all this insanity going around a place where that really shouldn’t be happening.
Pegg:
Let’s not forget I was guiding Tom through that little Chinese village on the other end of the phone. But that’s the central joke of Hot Fuzz. We’ve taken two things that shouldn’t really be together and put them together. Essentially that’s the structure of every joke, you juxtapose any two categories that shouldn’t necessarily be in the same place, a duck walks into a bar kind of thing. The incongruity of it was a whole part of the comedy.
DRE:
What’s it like upping your game with all those great actors like Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent?
Pegg:
It’s nothing but good for you. As soon as you walk on set and you look around you and you see these people who you’ve grown up watching or you have massive respect for, you have to step up. You have to play you’re A game otherwise you’re just going to disappear. People like Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw are utter professionals and do nothing but brilliant stuff. So it’s the best environment for any actor. Look at [Sylvester] Stallone in Copland. He really raises his game. I think Stallone is a great actor. A lot of the time he’s in action fare which demands less of him as an actor. But when you surround yourself with great actors it brings out the best in you.
DRE:
I know that at least up until Eraser, Arnold Schwarzenegger would bring in his own writer to write his one liners. They never got credit because it was literally just a few lines. Did you guys spend a lot of time coming up with the one liners in Hot Fuzz?
Pegg:
I think the people that were brought in to write Arnold Schwarzenegger’s one liners must have had the easiest job on earth because all you do is come up with the most leaden pun for whatever’s just happened. Then deliver it in a slightly smug way. You just draw on those movies when you’re trying to think of those lines like “Cool off.” A friend of mine told me that when someone lands in the freezer during the supermarket scene I should have said “Rest in peas,” which I thought was very good. But they are fun!
DRE:
My eyeglasses have transition lenses so they turn into sunglasses in the sun. Sometimes, after they turn into sunglasses, I look at my reflection and feel cool. But in Hot Fuzz you get to play the coolest cop with the awesomest sunglasses.
Pegg:
Yeah, it’s fun to be a writer/actor and be able to write yourself parts like that. You get a little wish fulfillment because as you’re writing jumps through the air, firing two guns at once Hong Kong style you’re thinking, “I’m going to be doing that in a few months.” So it’s great fun to write yourself a part. Basically Edgar and me write the films that we want to see. We write the films that we don’t usually get to see or make in the UK so obviously there’s going to be a little bit of making ourselves look great in it.
DRE:
It is funny to read reviews of Hot Fuzz and see people pick the wrong movies you guys are referencing. Someone wrote that the scene where you are loading up with guys was reminiscent of Neo in The Matrix. But that is obviously Rambo.
Pegg:
Oh absolutely, it was more like The Wild Bunch or the commando scene in Commando. If you look at Wikipedia there’s a list of so-called references in Hot Fuzz which are virtually all wrong. There aren’t that many that we actually made specifically. The load up scene is a great example. Somebody said to Edgar, “That line when Angel says, I’m going to bust this thing wide open, what’s that from?” Edgar said, “It’s from everything.” It’s a much broader palette than Shaun of the Dead was.
DRE:
Do you look at it as a postmodern action film?
Pegg:
I guess so, since it’s self-referential so it’s now drawing attention to itself. Postmodernism is all about the recognition of self and using that as a creative start point. The film is very much self-reflective. It’s taking on the conventions and the themes and the clichés of a lot of other films and drawing attention to them so in that sense it is postmodern. But I think postmodernism is almost a condition as much as a decision. You almost can’t help it these days.
DRE:
I read all sorts of different things about your acting training. That you may be a method actor, is that true?
Pegg:
I’m not a method actor by any means. I guess method acting suits some people. To me, acting is acting is acting. [Laurence] Olivier said it once to Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man, “Act, dear boy.” I went to university to study theater, film and television so I have formal training in the arts but I became a standup comic and cut my teeth there.
DRE:
I was lucky enough to interview Woody Allen a few years ago and I asked him if he would ever do standup again. He said that he would like to but it takes so much time to build a set. Would you do standup again?
Pegg:
Yeah, I would. I did a couple of gigs recently in the UK and really enjoyed being back on stage. It’s a very immediate form of performance because you’re validated there and then. The minute the joke leaves your mouth they either laugh or they don’t. It’s not like you’re waiting for the edit. For that reason it’s extremely exhilarating but I think Woody Allen is right. Not only do you have to build the set, you have to work it through in safe environments until you’re natural and then take it out to the clubs. I might do a live show but I don’t know. I certainly would enjoy it. I really look back on those days fondly.
DRE:
The first time we spoke I asked you if read The Walking Dead and you said you do. After that got printed I know that you and [Walking Dead creator] Robert Kirkman became internet buddies.
Pegg:
That’s right. Now he sends me the new issues via PDF.
DRE:
So do you want to do a shout out to any cop or crime comics like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal?
Pegg:
Ed Brubaker gave that to me. He’s friends with Robert [Kirkman]. They were in Seattle. Robert emailed me and said, “My friend Ed is in town, can he come to the movie?” I said, “Absolutely. Of course.” He gave us Criminal and Nick [Frost] read it and said it’s fantastic. I’m going to read it on the flight to Toronto because I want to really read a good comic. Another comic I picked up at St. Mark's Comics a couple of weeks ago was Zombies vs. Robots. Chris Ryall wrote it and he also wrote the Shaun of the Dead comic book adaptation.
DRE:
I read a quote from you on the IMDB, which is always…
Pegg:
Sketchy, yeah.
DRE:
Yeah. I read that you turned down the role of Rorschach in Watchmen because it would become too "Simon Pegg IS Rorschach."
Pegg:
That is just so not true. I don’t even know what that means. I floated that I’d like to play Rorschach because I think he’s a great character. Also I’m ginger and funny looking. I think he’ll be fun to play. It’s funny when you read those things because they get put out there as fact. On the IMDB my agent keep taking off The Triviata as one of our projects. That was a sitcom that Nick and I were working on about three years ago. We shelved it because things really took off with the movies. Someone keeps putting it back on there and it’s like, “No, I’m not doing it anymore.” But the reason that is, is because some tabloid paper in the UK broke it as if I said we were doing it but that just wasn’t true. It seems like an odd story to make up.
DRE:
But you didn’t turn down Rorschach flat.
Pegg:
No, I was never offered it. I think when it was in the hands of Paul Greengrass I had a better chance at maybe getting a casting because I know Paul and would have put my case across. But now that it is with [300 director] Zack Snyder, he’s going to have his own choices, but I think he’d be a fun guy to work with.
DRE:
Have you seen any Shaun of the Dead tattoos on anybody?
Pegg:
I have. It’s cool and immensely flattering. A girl in Seattle named Wendy. She’s sexy and cool and has tattoos. Her tattoo is the cover of issue four of the Shaun of the Dead comic. But the weird thing is that maybe two months prior at a Virgin Megastore this guy showed me his tattoo based on the same image.
DRE:
You should get them together.
Pegg:
I said we should get them together, it’s a match made in heaven.
DRE:
Hot Fuzz is already doing so well overseas. Are you and Edgar planning on doing something together sooner rather than later?
Pegg:
The trouble is since Shaun of the Dead did so well a couple of projects have come up for both of us that we are now committed to. Edgar’s working with Marvel on Ant-Man which I might be involved in somewhat. Nick and I writing a project together, which we hope to film here in America maybe towards the end of this year or the beginning of next. But as Edgar and I touched down in Sydney for our Australian leg of our press tour we had this idea for the third film, which we’re very excited about. So as soon as we clear the decks we’ll get on with it and I think it’s going to be good.
DRE:
Would you want to play Ant-Man?
Pegg:
I think it’s important for Edgar to do a film that I’m not the lead character in. Though I think it would be fun. I haven’t read his script yet but I know it’s going to be really good. In the same way that we made the British bobbie into a bad ass, he’s effectively taken the smallest Marvel character and I have no doubt he’ll make it one of the best.
DRE:
Any Marvel characters you would like to play in a movie?
Pegg:
Probably Captain Britain [laughs].
DRE:
[laughs] With the flag on his face, chest and back.
Pegg:
I used to read Captain Britain when I was a kid. If they make a Captain Britain movie, there’s only one choice.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
