London: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – the west of England in the 1970s – there lived a boy named Simon Pegg.
He loved zombies, The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Wars, and dreamed of travelling far from his home to a remote and exotic world. Eventually, he got there: Hollywood.
The writer-actor behind geek-pleasing comedies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Paul – as well as portraying a young Scotty in the rebooted Star Trek film franchise – Pegg has come a long way from the town of Gloucester, a journey he recounts in the memoir Nerd Do Well, out this month.
The book offers a view of the movie industry from someone who is both an insider and an unabashed fan. It’s also a journey through Pegg’s formative influences, complete with digressions, flights of fantasy and strongly held opinions.
For Pegg, zombies are the greatest monsters ever, Star Wars a “childhood obsession” and a creative influence – and George Lucas’s lacklustre 1999 prequel The Phantom Menace a personal betrayal.
Phantom Menace is the only thing Pegg is negative about in a book that hints at emotional turbulence (his parents’ divorce, a painful early romance), but charts an upbeat course through childhood, drama school and university. It also shares his stint as a struggling stand-up and his fortuitous meeting, at a suburban London Tex-Mex restaurant, with friend, collaborator and co-star Nick Frost.
The real-life episodes are interspersed with pulp fiction-style chapters from a spoof thriller involving a James Bond-type hero named Simon Pegg and his robot butler Canterbury.
Such flights of fancy have been a feature of Pegg’s work since Spaced, a sitcom about an aspiring comic book artist and a wannabe writer (Pegg and Jessica Hynes), and their odd array of friends and neighbours. It was an apartment-sharing comedy similar to Friends, but more realistic and more fantastical, full of surreal flashbacks and dream sequences, and laced with pop culture references.
Broadcast between 1999 and 2001, it set the template for what Pegg has done since – make audiences laugh while paying homage to the genres that inspired him: zombies (Shaun of the Dead); cop buddy flicks (Hot Fuzz) and aliens-among-us sci-fi (Paul).
Pegg, 41, is one of a generation of geeky film obsessives – including Quentin Tarantino, JJ Abrams and Peter Jackson – risen to creative power. He loves monsters, aliens and superheroes – as do millions of moviegoers. But he’s also enough of an intellectual to wonder whether the interest is entirely healthy.
“It goes back to Jean Baudrillard, his thoughts about infantilism,” said Pegg. It’s safe to say he’s one of the few actors to bring up the French social theorist during an interview.
“If you look at the majority of popular cinema, it’s all very childish stuff,” he said. “It’s adults going to see men in tights and flying saucers. It’s all about keeping us in a state of childlike wonder, because it’s easier. We look to childish things as a means of keeping ourselves feeling secure.”
Shaun of the Dead proved an unexpected cult hit and provided a calling card to Hollywood for Pegg.
Since then, it’s fair to say, his career has exceeded his expectations. He has been the lead in Run Fatboy Run and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, appeared alongside Tom Cruise in two Mission: Impossible films and voiced a swashbuckling mouse in The Chronicles of Narnia: the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Next, he plays a bumbling detective in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, directed by childhood hero Steven Spielberg.
“Somewhere in me,” Pegg admits, “there is a little kid leaping up and down going, ‘I can’t believe this is happening!’” – Sapa-AP - Weekend Argus