erin_broadley

Simon Pegg's decision, in 2006, to take on the tiny role of Benji the office computer nerd in J.J. Abrams' Mission: Impossible III may have seemed like a lark at the time but now appears in retrospect to have been a wise career move. Next summer he'll be beamed up onto movie screens worldwide as a nerd with much bigger name recognition -- Montgomery Scott, a.k.a. "Scotty" in Star Trek, Abrams' mega-budget reboot of Paramount's most enduring franchise. Pegg is signed for three Star Trek films, but if you think you're going to get him to reveal more than that fourteen months before the release date, good luck. "I've learned a big lesson from Star Trek in secrecy," the actor delicately warned SuicideGirls when we called him up in LA this week, but we forged ahead anyway -- judge the results for yourself.

It's a testament to Pegg's versatility that, for much of his fanbase, Star Trek may in fact be the project they are least interested in. For some, it's all about the holy trilogy, which began with Pegg and collaborator Edgar Wright's wild 2004 zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead and continued with their send-up of buddy-cop actioners, Hot Fuzz, and will conclude with a third film, which Pegg reveals to us is now ready for the scripting stage and will be filming soon. As if that's not enough, this week he is starring in Run, Fatboy, Run, a David Schwimmer-directed comedy about a London marathon runner who abruptly leaves his pregnant fiance, comes to his senses, and tries to race back to her before it's too late.

Ryan Stewart: Hey Simon, how's it going?

Simon Pegg: Hey Ryan, how are you? You don't sound like a beautiful tattooed girl ...

RS: I am not, sorry. They don't let me anywhere near them, sadly. Enjoying LA?

SP: I'm loving it, actually. The weather's gorgeous. It's been a really good week. Jessica Hynes, who I wrote Spaced with, came out to LA to do some new commentaries for the Region 1 DVD release and she's never been to LA before so it's been really fun showing around and having her suddenly in these crazy situations where she's having a glass of Chardonnay with Drew Barrymore. She's had the best weekend of her life.

RS: Have you had a chance to get out to the New Beverly?

SP: I haven't. I missed Edgar's season there. I've literally been so busy when I was working that I missed out, but I've heard it's fantastic.

RS: Everyone tells me that's the place to be in LA these days.

SP: Yeah, I think Edgar started a real trend. I think there are quite a few people now that are gonna program seasons there. I think it's a great idea.

RS: Run, Fatboy, Run was filmed a while ago. Did you keep up with the running? Did you benefit from it, health-wise?

SP: I did, I enjoyed the physical challenge of it. I think I'm probably more in a position to play Dennis now than I was then, to be honest, because I've since been doing so much running. But yeah, doing it on set was incredibly ... you know, a lot of endurance. It was actually a lot of fun, I enjoyed it.

RS: Did the director ever punish you with ten or twenty takes of those running scenes?

SP: No, no, he's supercool when it comes to that sort of stuff. He's very aware. He's an actor so he knows what it's like to be an actor and get abused by a director. He's actually really good at sensing when it's time to call it a day. Having said that though, he's very clear about what he wants and what he requires of us as actors.

RS: You were probably in shape when you began filming, coming off of Hot Fuzz, right?

SP: Oh yeah, absolutely. It was only six weeks after I finished shooting, so I was in pretty good shape. I obviously had to wear a fat suit and stuff, you know, just to bring me up to the eponymous "fatboy." I think to have gained weight in that amount of time would have been an unhealthy thing to do!

RS: Did you draw on anything from life for the character? Have you ever broken up with a girl, realized it was a big mistake, and then schemed to get her back?

SP: No, I don't think so. You know, fortunately I've never been put in that position, but it's nice to play the underdog, to play that kind of lovable loser guy. I think the current climate, culturally speaking, is very much about ordinary people at the center of these stories, particularly in cinema. When you look at films like Knocked Up or Superbad[/o] or The 40-Year-Old Virgin, these films are about kind of, just regular people who are put into these romantic situations. I think that's got a lot to do with the rise of reality TV and the video camera and the fact that the whole movie-making/television process has been so totally demystified, people are more inclined to accept 'everymen' or 'everywomen' or whatever, at the center of stories, rather than sort of supermen.

RS: You see Judd Apatow's capitalizing on that as a positive force for comedy, then.

SP: I think a lot of Judd's product is kind of a result of that, you know? He's been very sharp, to pick up on certain trends in society. I think that kind of thing ... he's picked up on a wave of change, where the geeks shall inherit the Earth. [Laughs]

RS: Right. By the way, I was just reading about the process of how you took the original Fatboy script, which was American-based, and re-worked it to be British. Are you also getting approached to do the reverse -- to Americanize popular British properties?

SP: No, I don't think I'd be the man for the job. You want it to be truthful and you want all the minutiae to be exactly right. That would be like asking an American to make something more British, you know what I mean? The writing for me is always about the truth even if you're writing something fantastic. You ground it in truth. My experience of America is very much as a visitor. I love it, but the kind of small stuff, the really fun stuff to write is the stuff that you know people are going to relate to who live here. I'd have to have an American advisor.

RS: Do you see a big divide between Brits and Americans when it comes to genre tastes and fanboy culture these days?

SP: No. God no. Fanboy culture is almost like a global unifier. You'll find that fans of Star Trek or zombie movies are the same the world over whether it's at Comic-Con ... they're all the same. Often similar personalities and they have the same kind of interests. It's a great leveler, I think.

RS: Are Brits into comics as much as Americans are? Are they riding this wave with us?

SP: Absolutely. Alan Moore is British and he's probably one of the greatest comic writers in the history of the genre. We have an enormous tradition of comics going back to 2,000 AD and Battle and up through underground titles like Crisis and Revolver. There's a big comic-book culture in the U.K. And we love our American comics as well, obviously Marvel and D.C. are all conquering and not only that, but the smaller companies, Dark Horse and -- well that's a British company, actually. Is it? No it's not.

RS: The movie you're doing with Nick Frost, Paul, you play a comic-book guy in that one, right?

SP: They're more sort of like fanboy-geeks kind of characters, really. They're Comic-Con attendees, kind of thing. And they're sort of British, but in America for Comic-Con.

RS: Are you gonna actually do some filming at Comic-Con this year?

SP: I don't know. We haven't decided yet. I don't know the logistics of whether it'd be easier to just mount a fake Comic-Con in San Diego when it's quiet or ... you know, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and with Star Trek, our audience is very much the kind of person that would attend Comic-Con so I think we might cause a bit of a stir if we suddenly turned up filming something in the middle of the convention center! Might start a riot.

RS: You mentioned Shaun and Hot Fuzz -- has there been any progress on part three of the trilogy?

SP: Yeah, we know it entirely. We've just got to get our respective other projects done so we can get into the office so we can put it down on paper. We had the idea, we were landing in Sydney last year, for press there and Edgar and me had been knocking a few ideas around and suddenly we hit upon something that we both really liked and we're real excited about it, but we've just got to ... Edgar's got Scott Pilgrim to do and I've got Paul and Nick's doing Richard Curtis's new movie, so when that's all settled down we'll be back on it.

RS: I didn't hear Ant-Man in there.

SP: I'm not sure what's happening with Ant-Man. Edgar and me are quite funny, we don't really talk about our other projects with each other. We know they exist, but it's like talking about your boyfriend's other girlfriend. It took him a long time to read the Paul script. I was like, "Have you read it yet?" and he's like, "Yeah, I'll read it soon." I think it's that weird thing, there's a slight reluctance to not work together, you know?

RS: Give me a little bit of a hint as to what part three of the trilogy will entail. You don't have to give the store away.

SP: No. [laughs] We made a terrible mistake with Hot Fuzz. When we were doing our Shaun press, we'd come up with ideas for Hot Fuzz and whenever anyone asked us the question we'd say "You know, it's police, it's a kind of action movie about British police, blah blah blah", and that immediately gave birth to it before a word had been written and so while we were in the office people were going "Where's Hot Fuzz? Where's Hot Fuzz?" like it existed. I've learned a big lesson from Star Trek in secrecy. This is gonna be as spoiler-free as that. What I've said in the past is that if the equation is Shaun of the Dead x Hot Fuzz, then this would be the answer to that.

RS: Speaking of Shaun, are there any sub-genres of horror you feel as strongly about as zombies? I'm a big horror fan and I'd love to see you take on the genre from another angle, maybe.

SP: Yeah, no I think zombies were kind of my niche in horror. I love all horror but I don't think there's anything I'd wanna take on. I know they're taking on The Wolfman again, the big Universal characters have been re-addressed and re-addressed, but I don't know. It's an endlessly entertaining genre, but there's nothing quite like zombies for me that I feel like I would want to embrace, you know? I feel like we had something kind of new to say with zombies and with everything else, I'd have to think very carefully about doing another horror film. I like watching it and I wouldn't want to mess it up.

RS: Did you have fun working with J.J. again?

SP: I always have fun working with J.J. He's such a great guy, I don't have praise high enough for him. He's such a superb human being, let alone director. He's full of so much enthusiasm and he really is accomplished as a director, as well. I'm sure it's his training with Alias and stuff. Working on a show like that enabled him to have such an assured debut with Mission: Impossible III and now to take on something like Star Trek ... he's fantastic, he really is.

RS: What did he want you to bring to the role of Scotty? Did he want you to bring the comedy?

SP: I think he just wanted me to bring me, really, as far as I could tell. I got an email from him one day that just said, "Do you want to be Scotty?" and I looked at it three times and started laughing and showed it to my wife and she burst out laughing and I kind of thought, 'Well, okay, let's do it.' What I didn't want to do is go and do an impression of James Doohan, because I would never want anyone to think I was sending him up in any way or it up, because that is very, very, very, very much what this is not about. This Star Trek is not in any way a sort of ... there's no irony involved in it. It's a Star Trek film. It takes the material very, very seriously. I didn't want to appear to be doing a James Doohan because I think that would be the wrong approach. I approached it like James did, which was to look at the page and think, 'Okay, he's a Scottish physics genius and engineer from Linlithgow and that's my starting point, you know? I took it from there.

RS: Do you change your look at all for the part? You don't seem to change your hair a lot in your movies, that I've seen.

SP: Well, in Shaun of the Dead, I had like, red hair that was spiky and in Star Trek my hair is almost black and my eyebrows are black, so I do, really! [laughs]

RS: Should we expect you guys to bring Star Trek stuff to Comic-Con this year?

SP: I think that's probably a given, yeah. I think there will definitely be some kind of panel or some stuff. Don't quote me on that because I honestly don't know, but I'm going to be there for the American release of the Spaced DVD anyway, so I think I'll probably be doing a couple of panels.

RS: So what movies have you seen lately that you enjoyed?

SP: Well, I had a big splurge and watched all the Oscar films and I loved There Will Be Blood and No Country, both of those were fantastic. I loved Juno as well, which I've seen three or four times now. I watched a great film called The Orphanage, produced by Guillermo del Toro, a great Spanish ghost story that I really, really enjoyed. And when I was over here doing Star Trek that's when Cloverfield came out and I went and saw that and really enjoyed that. It was a pleasure to be able to go into work on Monday and everyone give J.J. a big round of applause because it had such a great weekend. But I haven't been to the cinema properly in a while. I'm gonna have some spare time coming up so I can enjoy going back to doing what I do, which is hanging out and watching films.

RS: Alright, great. Well, on behalf of myself and the beautiful tattooed girls, thanks for taking the time.

SP: Pleasure.



Run, Fatboy, Run opens in theaters on March 28. For more information, check out the offical site here.