Simon Pegg stars in RUN FAT BOY RUN(2008).
© Picturehouse
Mania Exclusive Interview: Simon Pegg
By: Rob VauxDate: Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Simon Pegg spent several years banging around British television before scoring a cult success with Spaced, a show he co-created with Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright. But it wasn’t until the massive success of Shaun of the Dead (directed by Wright and featuring Hynes) that international stardom came calling. He has since appeared in a number of projects—including Mission Impossible: III, directed by J.J. Abrams, and another successful re-teaming with Wright for cop movie send-up Hot Fuzz. He temporarily departed fanboy waters for the romantic comedy Run Fat Boy Run, in which he plays a terminal slacker determined to win back the girl of his dreams by running a marathon. Pegg sat down recently to talk about Fat Boy, future work with Wright and an upcoming film of some small note that sends him where no man has gone before.
Mania.com: So you’d probably have to have a lot of confidence to be able to wear those short-shorts in Run Fat Boy Run.
Simon Pegg: That’s probably the one giveaway in the film. Clearly, I have very well-defined legs that no fat man could ever carry off. (Laughter.) No, I wasn’t worried about wearing the shorts. I came to this off of Hot Fuzz, where I actually had to get pretty fit. So I had to wear a little fat suit here to get across Dennis’s girth. It was like dressing up. And what’s not to love about wearing tiny swimming shorts and running around North London at six in the morning?
M: But you never make him really fat, and so the title becomes a running gag.
SP: Well, we didn’t want the film to be a fat joke. That’s been kind of done to death and is slightly obvious. The point of Dennis is that he’s fat of mind, in a way. He’s inert and slothful. He’s not fit. So the fat thing is less relevant against the big picture. It’s more about Dennis’s state of mind.
M: Do you approach your humor with a particular ethos? What’s funny to you?
SP: I’m a big fan of American comedy. I’m a huge Simpsons fan, which made working with Hank Azaria on this film a joy. Hank will do the voices for you without even complaining. Also shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development, which is a wonderful show and should have run a lot longer than it did. Great American stand-ups like Chris Rock, who I just saw recently. He was so dynamic and so clever. I tend to consume as much comedy as I can. I like intelligent comedy. I’m less a fan of the sort of farcical spoofery that predominates now a little bit. I mean, slapstick can be intelligent, but we always said that Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead weren’t spoofs at all. They were homages if anything.
M: At what point did you realize that Shaun was going to be something more than a successful comedy—that it was turning into a modern classic?
SP: We never really thought about it in the making of it. We just wanted to make the film we wanted to see. Shaun was an absolute labor of love. We were so specific in how we made it and what we did, that the fact that people cottoned onto it and appreciated it was a nice vindication for us. Movie audiences are smart. They’re a literate, intelligent audience. They get stuff. The minute you start underestimating them or pandering to their baser instincts, then you make… well, not what we wanted to make. We realized things were kind of going crazy when we started hearing back from the likes of Sam Raimi and Quentin Tarantino… and ultimately George A. Romero. We were hearing from all our heroes basically, about how much they enjoyed it. You spend years loving George A Romero’s films and making a film that’s entirely a lover letter to him. Suddenly, he’s calling up and saying, “Do you want to do a voice in Diary of the Dead?” It doesn’t get any better than that.
M: Any thoughts on doing a sequel to Shaun?
SP: Not really, except that we came up with the title From Dusk ‘Til Shaun, which just seems to fit. Otherwise… no, I don’t think so. The story’s been told, Shaun has finished his journey, and as it is—not to give too much away, hopefully everyone’s seen it—but by the end, most of the characters are dead. A sequel wouldn’t feature most of the best characters, including one of the main ones, which means it would just be cashing in. I have no interest in doing that.
M: You seem to be on quite a roll these days.
SP: I guess so, yeah. I mean, work begets work and we’ve had a good run with Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Other options are opening up. You just want to do good work, really. I don’t really have a plan. You don’t think, “oh I want to be there in five years.” You just do whatever comes next. Fortunately for us, we self generate, so we’ve always got things in the pipeline. Nick Frost and I have just written another film together. Edgar Wright and I will write another film together to close the trilogy that started with Shaun and Hot Fuzz. I think even if no one was offering me anything, I’d still be writing stuff for myself. That’s fortunate, because it means I can always keep working.
Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) is ready to take on that pesky Simon Skinner in HOT FUZZ(2007).
© Rogue Pictures
M: So you’re rolling along and then you suddenly land Scotty in Star Trek…
SP: Yeah it was a surprise. I had just stepped off a plane and I got an email from J.J. Abrams. It was just one sentence: “Do you want to play Scotty?” I showed it to my wife and she laughed, and we carried on laughing all the way home. Then I called J.J. and said, “Are you serious?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “Of course I’d like to play Scotty, but is it the right thing to do? Am I tying myself to something which could run and run?” J.J. just said, “Well if the worst thing that happens is that we get to spend three months together every three years and have a great time, what’s the problem?” I thought that was a good argument, so I said yes.
M: How do you step into the shoes of a character like Scotty? Do you try to make it brand new or do you go back and look at the original episodes?
SP: I tried to make it brand new because I think it would be disrespectful to James Doohan to just go and impersonate his Scotty. He took on the role as this physics genius and engineer in the great tradition of the Scottish (because of course they made a lot of important contributions to contemporary industrialized society). I thought I’d approach it the same way he did, which is to start from scratch. So I tried not to watch too much of the original series, as much as I love it, because I wanted the performance to be a tribute to him and what he did with the character, not just an impression. There’s a dangerous line you tread there, because if I started to do an impression of Mr. Doohan, then it might look like I was making fun of him, and that’s the absolute last thing I would ever want. He created one of the most significant figures in modern sci-fi.
M: Have the fans been supportive?
SP: Reaction to my playing the part has been fairly mixed, actually. Some people have said “Great!” and some people are saying, “I don’t get it, why is he playing that part?” I completely understand that because Star Trek is very precious to a lot of people and they want it to be right. My party line on it is—and obviously I can’t reveal anything about the film itself—but as a Star Trek fan, if I wasn’t in the film, I’d want a Star Trek fan to be making the film. And it is being made by a Star Trek fan. J.J. is that person. He’s exactly the person that those people should want, and the decisions he makes are in accordance with that love.
M: So what was it like walking on the bridge that first day?
SP: If I did walk onto the bridge, which I may or may not have done. (Winks.) No, it was incredible entering into those environments. You look around and you think, “I’m actually on board the Enterprise.” It never escaped me how cool that was. J.J. and I used to laugh about it. Was it Orson Welles who said that making movies was like having the biggest train set in the world? That’s what it was like: playing with the biggest toy in the world.
