Simon Pegg features

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Arresting: Simon Pegg (right) and Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz
From tea-time TV to global movie phenomenon
12/05/2007

'Hot Fuzz' has turned Simon Pegg and Nick Frost into Hollywood stars - and it's thanks to a wasted youth in front of the TV. They talk to James Rampton

The comedian and actor Simon Pegg had a textbook geeky childhood. "When I was a small boy," he says, "my bedroom was painted green like The Incredible Hulk. I'd sit on the bed reading comics while a whole bigger world was taking place outside. But you know what? I don't care. I'm proud of that. I'm glad I did it - it's made me who I am today."

It's true that immersing himself in such geekiness has paid off for 37-year-old Pegg. For a start, he and his best friend and long-term collaborator Nick Frost, 35, have converted their shared love of schlocky TV into Perfect Night In, a whole evening's prime-time schedule on Channel 4 tomorrow. They are running clips from comedies such as The Morecambe and Wise Show, The Dick Emery Show and The Young Ones; sci-fi shows such as Doctor Who, The X-Files and The Incredible Hulk; and other popular programmes such as Animal Magic, Superstars and Dixon of Dock Green. Making Perfect Night In brought home to Pegg and Frost the significance of television in forming their characters - and, by extension, their comedy.

"TV played a very big role in my upbringing," says Pegg. "We used to tick what we wanted to watch in the Radio Times, and big programmes were national events. TV was all we talked about at school. My first ever bit of stand-up was in front of my school friends and was all about children's television - 'That was a funny programme, wasn't it?' With the explosion of multi-channel TV, television can seem like a trashy magazine nowadays, but back then it was like having a proper theatre in the corner of your living room."

So far, so predictable, you might think. The pair's list of choices for Perfect Night In might sound as if it was plucked from the tired routine of an early 1990s stand-up. But all is not what it seems. Pegg and Frost have achieved something remarkable: they have reinvented and reinvigorated a hackneyed field of popular culture. The two have been able to turn their love of all things kitsch, clichéd and parochial into a compelling, original and global phenomenon.

Both of their movies, Shaun of the Dead, the "zom-rom-com" set on the mean streets of, er, Crouch End in north London, and Hot Fuzz, the Point Break-style cop thriller located in the sleepy West Country town of Sandford, have become monster global hits. Pegg and Frost have made the specific universal. Their movies have worked so well because the filmmakers have not compromised their integrity or tried to second-guess their audience. As Frost says, "We're always very honest in our filmmaking. We never try to make films for everyone - that will never work. We simply try to make films for us and our friends. We know that all over the world there are enclaves of people like us. The films speak directly to them."

Pegg takes up the theme. "Our films strike a chord because they're resolutely British. We don't occupy the middle ground and we don't pander to audiences. Americans don't think, 'Where's this?' They immediately know they are in a real place."

Pegg goes on to recall the giddying sense of excitement when Shaun of the Dead broke through on the other side of the Atlantic. "It definitely established me on a more global scale. Because the film did so well in America, it meant that I connected with people in the mythical land of Hollywood - Tarantino, Romero, Raimi. They saw something of themselves in me. I was reminding them where they came from before they were lumbered with multi-million-dollar movies!"

Hot Fuzz has just replicated the success of its predecessor, breaking all box-office records for a British comedy in the US. Pegg attempts to rationalise its success. "It's the same idea as Shaun of the Dead - we take something very English and cram it into an American context. It's grounded in the UK. Before writing Hot Fuzz, we cruised with police patrols in Glastonbury, Frome and Cirencester, and started to hear their stories. As soon as we hung out with those policemen, the film started to write itself.

"But the comedy happens when this quintessentially British film morphs into a big action movie - Heartbeat pupates into Lethal Weapon 10. The humour stems from the fact that every grandiose touchstone of hard-boiled American action movies is put into a very parochial British setting. Hot Fuzz is embracing the tradition of the American thriller while lovingly stroking its hair."

Pegg and Frost have just returned from a five-week promotional tour of Hot Fuzz in the US. Pegg can hardly credit the response it received. "The cinemas were full, and people kept coming back to see the movie. American audiences are much more vocal than we are, and wherever we took the film, they greeted it with whooping and hollering. It's hilarious - they make so much noise. We wound up in LA, and it was one of the most mental weeks of my life." Pegg sounds incredulous. "I have to say, it's quite bizarre being the toast of Hollywood. Famous people were queuing up to introduce our Q&A after the screening in LA."

Pegg is clearly on a roll in America. Following on from roles in Mission: Impossible III, Big Nothing (opposite Friends star David Schwimmer), Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (in which he played the deathless role of Bearded Cannibal), and The Good Night (alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Penélope Cruz), he is now taking the lead in both the adaptation of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Run, Fat Boy, Run, a comedy about a marathon runner, directed by Schwimmer.

It is clear that Frost has had a ball in the US, too. "We had one day off in five weeks - it was absolutely life-sucking. But in the final week, I hired a bright red Porsche. We had worked so hard, I thought I deserved it. I know it's a massive phallic symbol, but it's great. You can easily see why people get addicted to LA." Pegg and Frost are planning to shoot their next film in the States. "It's a road movie with a sci-fi twist," says Frost, "and we'll be playing English characters driving round America."

What this symbiotic pair communicate above all is their sheer, boyish delight at hitting the big time in Hollywood. They still can't quite believe that they've made it - and that's very infectious. Frost almost whistles in astonishment at how far they've come. "Fifteen years ago, we first became friends when Simon's then girlfriend worked with me at a Mexican restaurant called Chiquitos in Staples Corner in north London. She and Simon split up, and he says he got me as part of the divorce settlement.

"I still feel like I'm starting out in my career, and I really, really love it. Some people's lack of joy in their job astonishes me. I'm still amazed every day when I come in and someone says to me, 'Would you like a cup of coffee, Nick?' "I've lived in squats all over London and worked as a waiter for eight years, and never a day goes by now where I think, 'You know what? What I really want to do is go back and work in Chiquitos! I really miss mopping that restaurant floor at 1am.' "

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I'll add more to this over time... but if you see any features please feel free to add as well.

[Skylace]

I've been a big fan of these two since before "Hot Fuzz"(which I have yet to see but want to).

I am glad that they are becoming more known in the States now as well.

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Simon Pegg: America's most wanted
The US can't get enough of Simon Pegg: 'Hot Fuzz' is a box-office smash and 'Shaun of the Dead' DVDs are flying off the shelves. Is this self-confessed nerd about to become the next Sacha Baron Cohen?
By Nicholas Barber
03 June 2007

The road to Hollywood is strewn with battered and bruised British comedians who were once touted as the next Peter Sellers - Lenny Henry and Lee Evans over here, Steve Coogan and Rik Mayall over there - so how come Simon Pegg has made it in one piece? His rom-zom-com, Shaun of the Dead, was a surprise smash in 2004, and has since sold 1.3m DVDs in the US. Variety even quotes the unlikely statistic that - according to the film's distributor Universal - 40 per cent of all American 17- to 39-year-olds count themselves as fans of Shaun of the Dead.

But in box-office terms Shaun has been soundly truncheoned by this year's follow-up, Hot Fuzz, which has made nearly $20m in the US and $50m elsewhere in the world: not bad for a comedy about two West Country village bobbies. The films' star and co-writer is now a bosom buddy of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, he's on hanging-out terms with Quentin Tarantino, and he's had Tom Cruise's phone number on his mobile ever since he took the Q role in Mission: Impossible III. Coming up is Run, Fat Boy, Run, with Thandie Newton, directed by his friend from Friends, David Schwimmer. And he's just started rehearsals for How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, an adaptation of Toby Young's memoir about his abortive stint on Vanity Fair in New York.

As lucrative as Pegg's own brace of films has been, How To Lose Friends marks the first time that Hollywood has seen him as a leading man, able to stand out opposite A-list Americans. "I've been cast in it for a very long time," says Pegg. "It was early last year when I read it and liked it. And then suddenly it started getting cast, and Kirsten Dunst had a part, and then Jeff Bridges was in it, and Danny Huston. I started to think, 'Jesus Christ! I'm out of my depth here!' It is kind of scary and weird, but it happened slowly, by increments."

You could say the same for Pegg's rise-and-rise in general. Now aged 37, he's no overnight sensation, but someone who has proceeded along the path to stardom in careful steps. First, he began performing at school assemblies in Birmingham. Next, he studied drama at Bristol University, where he opened a comedy club with another student, David Walliams. After graduation he made the requisite move to London, and was spotted on the stand-up circuit by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, the creators of Father Ted, who invited him to audition for their sketch show, Big Train. In 1999, he appeared in the sitcom he co-wrote with Jessica Stevenson, Spaced. This was directed by Edgar Wright, and it featured Pegg's best friend and former flatmate, Nick Frost, so the next step was for the three boys in the gang to make a film together. Both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star Pegg and Frost, and both were co-written by Pegg and Wright, the director. The secret of Pegg's success? "I've been very lucky to meet people who have similar interests and goals to me," he says, simply. "I owe it entirely to them."

Since Monty Python, it's hard to think of another British comedy team which has written, directed and appeared in its own hit films. And yet Pegg's progress from drama school to stand-up to sketch show to sitcom to cinema seems remarkably orderly. He says not. "I wasn't thinking, 'I want to end up as a movie actor'," he insists. "That was always an appealing idea, but it always seemed so far away. And the reason I never saw Spaced or Big Train as a stepping stone is that I cared about them so much at that time. It was all about getting it done in the here and now."

The furrow-browed concentration which goes into Pegg's work is evident when you watch it. Spaced, a sitcom about a pop culture buff, made by pop culture buffs for pop culture buffs, was crammed with blink-and-you'll-miss-it homages to Pegg's favourite sci-fi and action movies. It repaid multiple viewings, hence it established a fan-base of pale, male devotees who would keep rewinding and freeze-framing until they'd spotted every detail that Pegg and co had so meticulously slotted in. There's nothing lackadaisical or random about his comedy.

"I think that's just because I'm anal," he says. "But no matter how tiny a joke is, there's someone out there who gets it. No matter how arcane the reference you make or the joke you tell, somebody will get it, and you have to aim everything you do at that one person. It always feels that much more gratifying as a spectator when you pick up on those things, too, not only because you feel good about yourself, but because you feel like you're being spoken to on a very personal level."

Pegg is quite serious about all this. He's courteous and affable, but there's no denying his earnestness. (The only gag he makes during our conversation is that he'd "love to do a film that was a dark drama... and where I had the power of flight".) He will reveal that he's married and lives in north London, but he's reluctant to talk about his personal life or his well-known pals. And while the character he'll play in How To Lose Friends doesn't mind what he does, just as long as he can rub shoulders with celebrities in America, Pegg himself wants to keep making films about "being British", and he's so focused on his work that he's almost embarrassed by fame's fringe benefits. Maybe that's why he's won friends and influenced people.

He didn't switch from TV to film because he wanted to be a superstar, he says. "There's a permanence to film which television doesn't have. I remember when we were doing Spaced, we worked our heart out on that show, we really really put everything into it, and then we'd get the ratings in and it would be, like, a million and a half, and we'd think, what's the fucking point? Television's so ephemeral, it's out and it's gone. That's why we decided to make a movie."

The irony of Pegg's big-screen ascendancy is that he hasn't tried to make broad, populist blockbusters. Like Spaced, his films are aimed specifically at viewers who study horror movies and cop movies as nerdily as he does. In short, they're films aimed at geeks. It just so happens that with superhero film franchises and TV series proliferating, and with people posting their own home-made versions of Star Wars and Goodfellas on YouTube, Pegg and his cohorts are bang on the zeitgeist. "I think the internet's got a hell of a lot to answer for," he says. "Geeks who used to think they were alone, or who only ever met up at conventions, they've suddenly found this platform where they can all communicate. It's the rise of the geek. And if you think about the film-makers now who are doing good work in Hollywood, they're all geeks. Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, Edgar... the majority of them have grown up just obsessing about films, and now they're getting to make films themselves. I think there might have been a typo in the Bible about the meek inheriting the earth." Maybe so. But Pegg, who's both meek and a geek, should qualify either way.

The DVD of 'Hot Fuzz' is out on 11 June


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'Always play losers'
Simon Pegg talks to Patrick Barkham about piling on the prosthetic pounds for his new film, being a kidults' posterboy and completing his 'Cornetto trilogy'
September 5, 2007
The Guardian

Concerned fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz can stop fretting. So can Nick Frost. Simon Pegg may have taken his talents as doleful comic underdog to star in Run, Fat Boy, Run, a glossy romcom directed by new best pal David Schwimmer, but Pegg is anxious to reassure everyone that he's still devoted to Frost, his old comedy partner. Pegg's second screen project with Schwimmer came about "purely by coincidence. It's not like he's replaced Nick. Because he never could." Pegg turns a little misty-eyed as he contemplates Frost, "my common-law wife".

Frost will be attending the premiere of Run, Fat Boy, Run. "He gets jealous of people," sighs Pegg. "He might punch David out." Frost and Pegg met when the former was a waiter in a Mexican restaurant in London. Frost obviously keeps him on his toes. "He does as well. Very much so," Pegg agrees quietly.

Pegg is less on his toes and more hobbling around on his heels after stepping into the pitiful training plimsolls of Dennis Doyle for Run, Fat Boy, Run. Pegg had just lost two stone to play rural supercop Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz and didn't have the time to put it back on, so he donned three prosthetic stomachs of differing sizes. Dennis is a commitment-phobic loser who has scarpered from his implausibly beautiful (and pregnant) true love Libby (Thandie Newton) at the altar. With Libby happily hooked up with a hunky American hedge-fund manager (Hank Azaria), Dennis sets about winning her back by running a marathon.

Given Pegg's comic tributes to the zombie genre with Shaun of the Dead and cop action movie with Hot Fuzz, you might expect a knowing retelling of something from the Four Weddings stable. But this, as Pegg makes clear, is a very different film. Frost and Edgar Wright, Pegg's usual collaborators, were not involved. Instead, Pegg was employed as a co-writer to "polish" the US script and make it work in a London setting. "Americans are slightly more comfortable with sentiment, and the original script was slightly more sentimental," says Pegg tactfully. "I made it a little bit more cynical, but not in a negative way."

From Dennis's eccentric gang of mates to east London's Columbia Road getting the Notting Hill treatment, Run, Fat Boy, Run looks more like a Working Title production than any Working Title film. Pegg agrees that the movie is "absolutely" pitched at the American market as well as British audiences, but defends the rather familiar starring role for the London Eye and the Gherkin. Apart from the marathon, he argues, the film is set in Hackney. "It's probably an even blend of postcard London and real London."

Then there is Nike. The film's marathon is called the Nike River Run, Dennis is given a box-fresh set of Nikes by his landlord and, at times, it appears that the capital itself is sponsored by the sports giant. Pegg sighs. "I know. I had a problem with that. The problem was we couldn't use the London Marathon, because they are tied up in another movie. So we had to invent this run. I cringed every time I came on set and there was all this corporate sponsorship everywhere. But sometimes, to make an omelette ..." He clears his throat with a wry grimace and struggles back on-message. "That was just the way it had to be, and of course we're very grateful to them for it."

Pegg's recipe for preventing a backlash against his popularity is to continue to play the underdog. "A backlash is fair enough if the quality drops, but if it's just for the sake of a backlash then that's just cynical," he reasons. "That's why you should always play losers because people love losers. The minute you threaten any kind of success, you're on the edge of being derided."

"Everyman" is a term often bandied in his direction. Average in height, looks and pallor, Pegg excels in the short-sleeved shirted uniforms of Britain's underpaid service sector. Is he insulted by this back-handed compliment? "Not really. It's weird. Me and Martin Freeman both get this, we're supposedly great 'Everymen', but I think it's just because we're fairly average," he says.

If Pegg is not an Everyman, then he is a posterboy for the kidult generation. Male fans who have flatmates and Xboxes well into their 30s will be relieved to hear that Run, Fat Boy, Run is not his ageing adolescent swansong. "Nick and I are writing a movie called Paul which we'll be shooting in America next year. We both play adolescent types in that," says Pegg, who married two years ago and lives quietly in north London. He may be more mature than his roles - he confesses to writing strident emails to the Guardian complaining about the preponderance of floral clues in its quick crossword - but remains fascinated by this audience that is growing up, or not, with him.

"Our parents' generation were encouraged to settle down and become adults a lot sooner, in their early 20s. Now we've suddenly got our whole 20s and even our 30s to arse around, and nobody is quite sure what to do with it, so all we do is regress back to when we were younger and find the things that we enjoyed doing then. There's this great shift towards nostalgia and looking back." He leans forward. "I'd like to get to the bottom of that. We're now being nostalgic about recent things. As soon as nostalgia catches up with the present, it will be Armageddon. When I see I Love Early 2010 in 2010, that's when we're in trouble."

Apart from his future project with Frost, Pegg is also eager to complete what he and his co-writing collaborator Edgar Wright call "the blood and ice-cream trilogy". Each film, he explains, "will feature a Cornetto in varying flavours. Shaun of the Dead has strawberry, Hot Fuzz has the original Cornetto flavour, and there will be a mint-choc chip in the third film. We don't quite know how or why yet, but it will happen. It's like Krzysztof Kieslowski but with confection. It's Three Colours: Cornetto." You can see the box set already: "With free ice cream."

After promoting Run, Fat Boy, Run, Pegg will return to his day job in his office in London - writing scripts, while sitting opposite Frost. "It's a tax on you. In order to have the autonomy that we have, you have to put in the hours," he explains. He's not complaining. "Now that's not at all boring. I love sitting opposite Nick Frost. I spend the day pissing myself laughing, but it's still a job. You have to go through that in order to do what you want to do. If I didn't write, there would be no Hot Fuzz, and my career would be considered less kind of, glittering. Don't put glittering - that sounds really fucking up myself." Pegg is blushing. "'Impressive' - that's the word, because there are levels of 'impressive'. Glittering just sounds like, 'Yeah, I'm great'".

Run, Fat Boy, Run opens on Friday.

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Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow pick Pegg to be daughter's godfather
Washington, Sept 10:

Comedian Simon Pegg has been chosen as godfather to Apple, the 3-year-old daughter of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow.

But the 'Shaun of the Dead' star does not intend to give any moral guidance to the little girl; instead he wants her to have fun. "I'd like to think I'm a really great, fun godfather," Contactmusic quoted Pegg, as saying. "It's much more interesting than trying to be a good influence on her. I'm a comedian - it's what they expect," he added.

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Here's a great download for anyone who likes Pegg's humour. It's the BBC Radio programme 'The 99p Show' which was broadcast a few years back. It's pretty much a standard Radio Panel show, though as with all shows like this it's the people on the panel who make it good. This file contains the first two series and it makes for great listening.

DOWNLOAD

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If he's not happy then how could it possibly be any good?

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Simon Pegg's Trek homage
By JEN BLACKBURN
10 Mar 2008

IS SIMON Pegg taking method acting to the extreme? After nabbing the plum role of Scotty in the new Star Trek movie, the Spaced star told TV Biz he wants to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps and have his ashes blasted into space. As this happens, he also wants The Beatles to be blaring away.

“At my funeral anything will go dress wise. Don’t feel a need to wear black. And I’d have Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles playing. It’ll get everyone a bit psychaedelic - waving their hands in the air,” he revealed. “And James Doohan who played the original Scotty was fired into space, so I’ll have to do that with my ashes too.” Talk about a shooting star.

Simon has just returned from LA where he has been filming the movie alongside Eric Bana, Zachary Quinto and original Mr Spock Leonard Nimoy. The film, directed by Lost creator JJ Abrams, focuses on the early lives of Captain James T Kirk and his crew.

“I just got back from LA filming Star Trek and then I’m going back out there in a couple of weeks to film the rest of it,” Simon said. “It’s a dream role and amazing fun to be Scotty in Star Trek and see it all unfolding. I think it will be amazing. JJ Abrams is directing and he’s a wonderful man. He’s so committed to it being a proper Star Trek movie. It’s so faithful and so on the money that the fans are going to be very happy.”

He continued: “Filming’s going very smoothly. I had such a great time. Everyone is very funny. When the cameras roll the laughter has to stop but off set it was a scream. Zachary Quinto from Heroes is just a great laugh.”

Simon is hot Hollywood property right now. He’ll soon be seen in How To Lose Friends And Alienate People with Kirsten Dunst, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges and new movie hottie Megan Fox. And there’s one particular scene he hopes not to repeat too often – one where he gets his kit off.

He moaned: “I've stripped off so often I'm bored of it. I'm 38 now so I can't really get away with it. “I'm not naked in Star Trek but I do get slightly damp. That's all I can tell you. In How To Lose Friends I strip down to my pants for a scene with Megan Fox. I dance around in my underwear for her. I'm looking like a nerd.” He added: “She plays an incredibly beautiful young film star and I'm her bitch and have to dance for her.” It's a tough job...

The Brit comedian shot to fame on UK TV in Spaced and Hippies but is now focusing on Tinseltown. “At the moment things have gone a certain way and films are what I’m concentrating on. Films are actually easier. Television is a real hard slog,” he mused. “When we did Spaced we struggled to get it made with the resources we’d got. TV is incredibly competitive but film feels like you’re being left alone to do your own project - even though you’re at the whim of a studios.”

And he admitted he wants to steer away from comedy and follow a similar career path to Jim Broadbent. “I always look at Jim Broadbent as a great role model - someone who could go off to Hollywood and win an Oscar and then come back and do an episode of Miss Marple. I wouldn’t cut myself off from anything as long as there was a good script.”

But he has no plans to relocate to LA. “That’s not necessary. I think the notion of having to move to LA is not really true anymore unless you want to work in US serial television.

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Simon Pegg: He’s Mr Popular
Lose friends and alienate people? Not a bit of it - Hollywood can’t get enough of Simon Pegg. Meet the world’s unlikeliest romcom hero
Stephen Armstrong

When Simon Pegg was 12, he - like almost every child his age - watched ET. Unlike most 12-year-olds, he noticed that in a scene where the diminutive alien spotted a child dressed in a Yoda costume, John Williams’s score briefly changed to echo his own theme from The Empire Strikes Back. “It was never explained,” he says, leaning forward enthusiastically to underline his point. “You just see Yoda and hear the music. I thought - my God, I get that. He’s put Yoda’s music in because we’re seeing Yoda. I felt so clever and satisfied that I’d been regarded as an intelligent human being by the movie-maker. I wanted to engender that feeling in others and say, ‘I’m not up here saying watch me, I’m saying come and do it with me.’ ” Twenty-five years later, Pegg is in Hollywood, having just finished work on his latest film, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, when he gets a call saying Steven Spielberg would like to meet him.

So he trots over to the motion-capture set for the ET director’s latest project - the first in a trilogy of Tintin movies. Motion-capture sets are bizarre, empty places. The event has been shot and is held in a computerised camera, which allows the director to swoop around the scene. As a result, there is only a computer guy and Spielberg sitting there.

“Steven’s smoking a stogy, cap on head, like he’s always been since I was a baby,” Pegg says, shaking his head in wonder. “I shook his hand and chatted about films. He gave me the mo-cap [motion-capture] camera, and I had a play around with it. Then he said, ‘Hey, maybe you and Nick Frost could play the Thompson Twins.’ In Tintin. A Spielberg movie. To work with him is beyond .. . ” He trails off, lost for words.

Life has been full of these pull-focus moments for Pegg recently. The 38-year-old keeps finding himself in incredible situations, cartwheeling inside, but trying to act casual. In How to Lose Friends, for instance, Pegg plays a fictionalised version of the British journalist Toby Young, whose confessional of the same name charted his incredibly unsuccessful stint at Vanity Fair in the late 1990s. The magazine’s infamous editor, Graydon Carter, is played by Jeff Bridges, who, Pegg found, is pretty much like The Dude, his unemployed LA slacker character from The Big Lebowski. Except when he’s actually on set.

“He’s very focused and method on set,” Pegg says, leaning back on his sofa. “He watches the monitor after takes, thinks about what he’s done, then goes back and changes it - it’s brilliant to watch, but on the first day it was a little intimidating. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Do you play tablas?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got these tablas in my trailer. I just bought them. Come over at lunchtime and we’ll play them.’

“So I went round to his trailer and, sure enough, he had these Indian drums, and he was teaching me how to play them and make that bendy noise. I started to play, and he picked up his guitar and started to strum along. I suddenly realised I was in Jeff Bridges’s trailer, playing tabla, accompanying him on guitar, and I just laughed out loud.”

In a way, it was that moment in ET - that switch in Williams’s score - that put him at Jeff Bridges’s knee. In the late 1990s, he created Channel 4’s cult sitcom Spaced with fellow comic Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) and with long-time collaborator Edgar Wright directing. The trio deliberately set out to pack the show with knowing references, loading it with elaborate bows to Star Wars, Resident Evil, Close Encounters, The A-Team and Fight Club.

Spaced begat Shaun of the Dead, Wright and Pegg’s spoof romantic-comedy/zombie movie, or rom-zom-com, which was a surprise sleeper hit in America in 2004 and has sold 1.3m DVDs Stateside. Variety quotes the unlikely statistic that, according to the film’s distributor, Universal, 40% of American men aged between 17 and 39 are fans of the film.

It also impressed a significant number of Hollywood power players: Quentin Tarantino, David Schwimmer, Mission: Impossible III’s director, JJ Abrams, and the comedy uber-producer Judd Apatow. Famously, Pegg dismissed the success of Shaun of the Dead with the quip, “It’s not like I’m going to be starring in Mission: Impossible III” - only to be cast as Benji in the movie a few months later. He’s now mates with all of the above.

“It’s very collaborative out there,” he muses on Hollywood. “Edgar’s been there all year. He’s living over Quentin Tarantino’s cinema at the moment. It’s basically a ‘rise of the geek’ thing. The generation who are starting to take over Hollywood are the people who grew up with video - loving film and TV, and taping it and rewatching it, just like the Spaced lot and the League of Gentlemen and the Mighty Boosh and Little Britain did. We all grew up on the same stuff and we get the same references. It’s like - if you can write and perform, then you’re in.”

Yet, despite Pegg’s magnanimous inclusive sweep across the British comedy industry, it is hard to think of another homeboy who’s got it quite so good. Sacha Baron Cohen, perhaps, and maybe Ricky Gervais: both have a healthy cameo career and are working on Hollywood-backed movie projects for 2009. What they haven’t yet got is a How to Lose Friends movie - a leading-man role in a proper American-distributed popcorn flick, with a glam-orous co-star (Kirsten Dunst) and someone else to write, produce and direct.

The result is edging Pegg towards a kind of 21st-century mix of Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis. He still writes his own stuff - there is a road movie with Nick Frost, Paul, out next year, and World’s End, the third in the Wright/Pegg “blood and ice cream” trilogy that began with Shaun of the Dead and led to Hot Fuzz, starts shooting soon - but after Run, Fat Boy, Run and Lose Friends, he stands on the verge of becoming Britain’s leading romcom hero.

In one sense, this is exceedingly unlikely. His cheerful, scruffy and enthusiastic on-screen characters are very close to the man himself – although the real-life Pegg is more inclined to discuss the politics of cinema or the essence of love songs than his gut-scratching alter egos.

He doesn’t have Brad Pitt’s abs, Daniel Craig’s jaw or Johnny Depp’s smoulder. He is an everyman with dreams - letting men think that they, too, might kiss Kirsten Dunst while allowing their girlfriends to believe the slob beside them might yet shape up.

Creating such dreams is a fitting role for the son of two dreamers. Pegg was born in Gloucester to a piano-salesman father who wanted to be a musician and a tax-office civil-servant mother who was passionate about amateur dramatics. His parents separated when he was seven, his mother moving with Pegg and his sister to a village that had an arcane trust bequeathed by an earnest noblewoman “to send children to places of artistic education”.

“Mum applied for the grant for me to go to a theatre-studies college in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was 16. She loved acting so much, but the idea of doing it professionally wasn’t an option for her as a young girl in Gloucester. So she scraped the money together and did everything she could to let me do it.” He is visibly moved as he retells this, though he is quick to add that his father was incredibly supportive too. Indeed, he got his parents and his sister roles in Shaun of the Dead - though, after chatting to Jon Voight at an LA premiere, it was his mother he called to share his excitement.

From Stratford, Pegg went to Bristol to study drama on an intensely theoretical course - his thesis was “A Marxist overview of popular Seventies cinema and hegemonic discourses”. It was there that he decided to take control of his own means of production. “The course was of such an analytical nature that it gave you this state-of-the-art overview of the culture in the nation,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be part of that “buffeted by agents” thing. maybe I want to be able to create something for myself’.”

As for the romcom thing - well, Pegg brought it on himself. Spaced had a “will they, won’t they?” element. He argues that Shaun of the Dead was a spoof romantic comedy, rather than a spoof horror film, and that Hot Fuzz was “deliberately taking on that guy-love homoerotic subtext most action films have, because I have a fairly romantic relationship with Nick - he’s my best friend and I love him very much - but also because there are some hilariously homoerotic moments in action cinema. Not least Danny Glover cradling the stripped-to-the-waist Mel Gibson in the rain at the end of Lethal Weapon, saying, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you’ ”.

He pauses to wonder why this is so. “I think,” he concludes, “the struggle for love is almost more powerful than the fight for freedom or against evil.” Pegg has won this particular struggle. In 2005, he married his long-time girlfriend, Maureen McCann, who used to work in the music industry, but is now his manager. They came up with the arrangement to spend more time together, but when I mention children, he laughs and says: “We have a dog.”

He is also keen to stay in Crouch End, north London, despite Hollywood’s embrace. “LA can be the most exciting place on earth and it can be the darkest, loneliest place ever,” he explains. “If you’ve got nothing to do, there’s just these big empty wide streets that go on for miles. . . ” He shivers. And, for a moment, you can almost hear that Williams theme from ET, the story of a traveller whose adventure gets a bit too big and who just wants to go home.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People will be released on October the 3rd

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I just found this interview - it's from a few months back

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Simon Pegg on Toby Young, zombies and the lure of the US
The How to Lose Friends... star talks stardom, Spaced and the "incredibly complex and fascinating culture" of the States.
Friday, 13 Mar 2009
inthenews.co.uk

In How To Lose Friends And Alienate People out March 16th on DVD and Blu-Ray, Simon Pegg plays British hack Sidney Young who lands a highly coveted job on an upscale Manhattan based glossy called Sharps. But his dream of finding himself on the inside the glamorous world of premiers, parties and rubbing shoulders with beautiful starlets goes disastrously, hilariously wrong thanks to a series of spectacular gaffes.

"It was interesting because I started the film directly after doing a big block of press for Hot Fuzz so I had literally just been in contact with about 600 journalists," says Pegg. "So it was fascinating and funny and not as weird as you might think it was. I didn't suddenly think 'oh I'm on the other side of it now and now I understand them.' I think journalists are individuals and I wouldn't presume to say they are all the same."

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is loosely based on British journalist Toby Young’s memoir of his time working on Vanity Fair magazine. But, as Pegg points out, although the book is the inspiration, the film is vastly different.

"The film is very much an adaptation of the book and I'm keen to stress that," says Pegg. "The book doesn't really lend itself to being a film in a sense, because it's very anecdotal and it's filled with huge tracts about philosophy and it's very much a book and an enjoyable one, but in order to make it into a film Peter (Straughan, screenwriter) had to shape it as such so it is pretty different."

But, says Pegg, one of the book’s themes – the increasingly blurred divide between celebrity journalism and the people they write about – is still very relevant, perhaps even more so now than ever. Sidney Young is a journalist who is desperate to be on the inside of what he perceives as the privileged lifestyle of the rich and famous.

"Toby/Sidney is a specific kind of journalist I think. It was originally set in the mid 1990s but I think now that kind of journalism, the sort of obsession with the material end of show business is now so rabid and ridiculous that the notion of the guy who is desperate to be in that world and at the same time, deconstruct it, is very topical.

"Nowadays, you see so many photographs of journalists over their columns and it's like 'well, what are you doing? Do you want to be famous or do you want to talk about being famous?' Of course some of them do want to be famous. It’s that position of having their cake and eating it. It's what Sidney definitely wants to be. It's like at one point, Sidney's editor at Sharps says to him 'you bitched and moaned because you couldn't get into the party, well stop bitching and moaning because you're at the party... '"

First and foremost, says Pegg, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is a classic fish out of water comedy. Sidney dives head first into the glamorous and seemingly sophisticated Manhattan pool and makes quite a splash but in all the wrong ways. The question is, will he sink or swim?

For Pegg, the initial draw was a sparkling script and the chance to work with director Robert Weide. A star-studded cast - with Kirsten Dunst as Alison Olsen, the magazine's bright but world-weary arts correspondent, Jeff Bridges as enigmatic editor Clayton Harding and Danny Huston as his immediate boss and romantic rival Lawrence Maddox – was a huge bonus. Megan Fox plays a beautiful young actress, Sophie Maes, who becomes the object of Sidney's desires, and Gillian Anderson is her all powerful publicist, Eleanor Johnson.

"They came to me with a great script and it was the combination of that and the chance to work with Bob Weide who directed one of my favourite TV shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm," he explains. "And the script really was a hoot – it was sharp and funny and beguiling and as an actor that's what you look for so that's really what drew me to the project. And of course, when you get the chance to work with actors of the calibre of Jeff and Kirsten, Danny, Megan and Gillian, well, what more could you ask for?”

The comedy community in America and indeed, US audiences has welcomed Pegg himself with open arms in general. Shaun of the Dead, his brilliant zombie comedy set in London, which he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright and starred in with his close friend, Nick Frost, won huge critical acclaim there. And their follow up, Hot Fuzz, was another hit Stateside. Recently, Pegg's sitcom, Spaced, which was first shown on British television eight years ago, was released on DVD in America and won glowing reviews. Quentin Tarantino, who championed Shaun of the Dead, and is a fan of Spaced, appears on the DVD commentary – a huge thrill for Pegg.

"There’s a scene in one of the episodes of Spaced where we did a little Pulp Fiction pastiche. And to be sat in the voice-over booth with Quentin talking about that scene, with him there, was the most bizarre and delightful moment of circularity ever," he says. "It was a 'look how far we've come!' sort of thing. It was a big moment."

What was it you liked about the story of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in essence? It's about a guy who fails...
Yes, it is. But it's just a great romp. It has some great set pieces and it's that classic underdog story which is always appealing to audiences when the character you are rooting for consistently lets you down but you stay with them. It's quite a classical character in a way; it's the hero that could. And I think there is something delightfully loser-ish about Sidney that I liked.

Did you see it as being about cultural difference too?
He goes over to America thinking that his ethnicity is going to appeal and that he is going to be quaint and he can't really impact on them at all and that his sweet British-ness is not an asset.

Have you ever felt that yourself when you go there?
We still have that odd appeal to some people over there and I'm not sure exactly what it is, the more time I spend over there the more I realise how foreign we are to them actually and certainly in going over and promoting British films you do realise that the one thing we do have in common is simply that we speak a version of the same language and to certainly to people in the interior of America, Britain is as foreign as Outer Mongolia.

At times it's almost like we become more British when we go there?
You sort of end up playing a role, which is a bit like Sidney does. There was a bit in the film that we ended up cutting out when Sidney tries to get a credit card with 'honourable' written on it so that he can pass himself as having a British title because women fall for that stuff. And sometimes you do find yourself becoming more British over there and I don't know whether that's trying to get ethnic sympathy or what it is.

Do you enjoy going over to the States?
I love it. I really enjoy going to America. We've just come back from a big extensive tour for the release of Spaced on DVD and you know it's great. It's incredibly complex and fascinating culture and it's never not exciting over there. It's bizarre and wonderful and terrifying and fun.

It had some great reviews over there, which must have been very pleasing...
We had more press coverage and certainly more unconditional positivity about the show than certainly we ever did here in the UK. It was lovely and a great vindication for us to have the show there after all of these years with such a great fanfare. It went to number two in the Amazon charts – I mean, this British sitcom from eight years ago, which was watched by about eight million people when it was on at home so it's good.

You had a reception for How To Lose Friends and Alienate People in Cannes and I know Toby was there with you. How has that worked out? Are you playing him in essence or is Sidney totally different?
I tried to approach the role in the same way I would any role, in that I'd look at what was on the page and draw it from that rather than anything else. I mean, particularly as it isn't Toby Young, it's Sidney Young and Peter made the decision to pull it away from being a straight biographical film and it would be silly in a way to get bogged down in an impersonation of Toby because very few people know what Toby sounds like let alone what he looks like. I mean, a lot of people know his work as a writer - he is prolific and well read by a lot of people. But I like to use the example of Nicole Kidman's nose in The Hours being a little distracting whereas she should have just realised that not a lot of people know what Virginia Woolf's nose looked like and got on with it. If I think if I'd started to do an impersonation of Toby, he's got quite a mannered way of speaking and quite a specific physicality, most people would have thought 'nobody looks like that. What the **** is he doing? Why is he acting like that?' So I tried to build him from the ground up rather than trying to copy Toby.

Have you ever been interviewed by Vanity Fair?
I haven't actually and I'd be intrigued to meet Graydon Carter [editor of Vanity Fair] just so that I could tell him that I'm not part of some conspiracy against him (laughs). One thing in the back of my mind was that I might have been alienating one of the most famous publications in America but it's not about Vanity Fair and I think Jeff's interpretation of Clayton who is a Gradydon-esque type of person is a fairly sympathetic one. He is a person who has simply got on even though in some respects it might have gone against some of his original principles. He's still done very well and it's not a damning portrayal. I've seen him interviewed and I'd love to get a bit of face time with him just out of sheer interest. And I've hung out with Toby and as much as I like him I can fully see how he would be, er, infuriating company.

Sidney is a more sympathetic character that the one that Toby himself portrays in his book...
Absolutely and Peter was very artful in creating that, you know he couldn't be quite as much of a steamroller and objectionable as Toby can be and as Toby seems to be sometimes. You have to root for him and have sympathy for him and kind of see his propensity to get into trouble as a flaw rather than a device and I think that differentiates Sidney from Toby. Also the idea of someone like Toby, acting the way he did, winding up making out with Kirsten Dunst under Brooklyn Bridge would be slightly unrealistic.

Talking of Kirsten, how was she to work with?
She's amazing and puts in a wonderful performance. I absolutely adore her. And Megan Fox surprised everyone. People expect it of Kirsten because she is such a seasoned professional, so when she turns in an amazing take everyone goes 'well, of course, it's Kirsten Dunst... ' Whereas when Megan did her first take, people only knew her as that amazingly beautiful piece of eye candy in the corner and then suddenly she comes out with a fantastic performance and suddenly everyone is surprised. I remember being really chuffed for Megan when we did the scene by the pool because I remember there being a palpable sense of amazement after Bob remembered to call 'cut'.

We've talked about Britain and America being divided by a common language but it seems that one of the areas where we do often come together is comedy and you would know that better than most. How much of British humour crosses over?
I think in essence it's 100 per cent. I think people mistake the cultural difference for differences in our sense of humour, you know, obviously the references change and the little things that we talk about are different. A joke about a little-known American celebrity is the same as a joke about a little-known English celebrity it's just that those people are different and the reason that the Americans laugh is because those people know who it is and vice versa. I think maybe we as British people have a tendency to be slightly more ironic socially but I think the Americans have an incredible command of irony performance wise. There's a myth about the Americans not getting irony and that's so not true and that's so off the mark and such a nasty, superior attitude on the part of the British people that say it because it's completely underestimating the American sense of humour. I think we have a real shared sense of humour and the gap between is getting smaller because the world itself is getting smaller with the Internet and YouTube and us understanding American culture more and vice versa, we're all starting the get the same jokes more and more. This idea of us having a 'different sense of humour' to me that's almost like a contradiction in terms. For me a sense of humour is the ability to sense humour and humour is humour...

But even so were you happily surprised at the warm reception that Shaun of the Dead received in the States?
Yeah. I think there were a lot of misfires in terms of British comedies trying to do well in America because they made too many concessions and ended up being diluted into something that wasn't British. And I think the reason Shaun of the Dead did so well is because it is so resolutely British and we didn't make any concessions and we absolutely, specifically kept it as British as possible. I think that's what ended up being appealing, because it's exotic in some respects you know and real and authentic. We made one change to the script with a view to it being released in America and that was to change the word 'p****d' to 'drunk' and that was because you know the joke about thinking the zombie was drunk was important and we didn't want anybody to think we thought it was a bit annoyed which is what 'p****d' means in America. And that was the only single thing we changed with a view to an American audience and they came to us, we didn't need to spoon feed them or talk down to them or include some references to American culture to make them feel wanted, they just got it.

One of the scarily good performances in How To Lose Friends and Influence People is Gillian Anderson as the publicist...
Yes, and that whole idea of them being the real puppet masters was an interesting one – of journalists having to work with publicists in order to have stories put out there. It's kind of sleeping with the enemy..

Have you got a publicist?
I don't have a full time one because I don't feel like I need one but I have publicists that I work with when the time arises. Like this point in time when I have to do publicity I'm working with people in the States. But generally speaking if I don't have anything to sell, I don't.

Life sounds pretty good for you...
Yes, I'm just bubbling along. I'm out there now and I have to keep working which feels like a partly daunting but partly exciting kind of prospect and you know, I just hopefully can keep doing the stuff I want to do. Nick [Frost] and I have this thing we want to shoot early next year and Edgar [Wright] and me have got our third film to do. If I can I want to try and continue to generate from here in the UK and work in the UK because if I can I will. Without sounding like a homebody, I would be much happier just working and living in my own and travelling when I needed to.

Why is it so important for you to continue working here and not, say, do more films in the States?
I could go to the States now and just work and do movies. But I don't want to do that. I don't just want to be at the mercy of casting directors, I want to write and the way I write is to write about stuff that I totally understand and know. I always think that the truth is the best starting point as a writer and that has to be your own experience and my experience is here in the UK. And our films are a very literal demonstration of being British and consuming American culture. They are very honest depictions of the kind of lives we lead. We have grown up here in England and have consumed a lot of American culture and are fans of it. And so far what we have done is a kind of demonstration of that. And I'm not saying that's what we'll always do. I mean, the fourth film Edgar and me do might be a drama, it might be something different. I've got plenty of ideas and as long people keep giving me the means to do it, I'll keep making films.

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Here's the full audio interview - download 8mb mp3

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Simon Pegg: 'I measure my life in terms of my relationship with Star Wars'
When Simon Pegg started out he had no plans to become a movie star. In fact he had no plans at all. So just how did the geek from Gloucester catch the eye of the world's best filmmakers? It's all down to "quantum attraction"
Tom Lamont
The Observer,
17 October 2010

Piers Morgan used to say of the actor Nicholas Lyndhurst that he may have been incredibly famous – this was back when Lyndhurst was an on-screen ubiquity as Rodney Trotter, as a time-traveller in Goodnight Sweetheart and an occasional cross-dresser in adverts for Smiths – but how much did anybody know about his private life?

There were no nightclub ejections or illicit affairs, to anyone's knowledge, really no Lyndhurst-based muck at all, and Morgan's point was that privacy could be pretty well maintained by the famous if the famous really wanted it. It is tempting to wonder if we have a present-day equivalent – whether such a thing is even possible in an age of the blogging hospital receptionist, the dusk-to-dawn ITV2 reality show, the biannually updated autobiography.

One who has tried is Simon Pegg: actor, comedian, Hollywood weevil who seemingly has a role in every blockbuster series going, and deeply private man. Which is his paparazzi-ringed nightclub of choice? What colour is his wallpaper? Pegg, who first became prominent as the star of TV show Spaced, gathered acclaim in the adored zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead, is now an established figure in major franchises such as Star Trek and (soon) Steven Spielberg's Tintin. But who has he shagged?

"I have problems with my private life," Pegg says, over soft drinks in north London. Juicy, I think – but he doesn't mean clarinet-sized crackpipes or an addiction to lipo, rather problems when his private life is nudged public. "Work is work, and you have to do interviews to promote your stuff. I'm just conflicted about talking about private stuff, and when that comes up in interviews I tend to shut down."

Sitting opposite him I peer anxiously at my list of questions. There's one about how he first met his wife; another about being best buds with Chris Martin of Coldplay. Pegg looks pretty relaxed, a first of two Diet Cokes nearly drained, limbs spread on a leather sofa and his Star Wars-themed trainers propped up on a table. But I still try to angle away my notepad, and mentally panic-fashion a few extra questions about zombie films just in case.

"We didn't tell anyone my wife was pregnant or that she'd given birth," he says, "but journalists found out and it was printed – 'Shaun of the Dad', very nice headline, thank you the Mail. It's not like I'm pathologically private, and I don't really have any secrets, but I just feel you have to hold on to something of yourself."

The 40-year-old has made good use of a particular trick, in the face of too-intimate interviewers, in which he diverts personal questions into chit-chat about his dog Minnie. There was a recent interview in which Pegg was asked, "What's it like being a father?", to which he replied, "My dog likes eating socks." Minnie, he reasons, doesn't read Heat or watch the TV channel E! and her bosom secrets can be sacrificed.

It brings us both to a difficulty. I'm not desperately keen to talk for an hour about the digestive whims of a Miniature Schnauzer. And Pegg, rather surprisingly, has just written an autobiography. It is why he has agreed to be interviewed – the imminent publication of a 300-page memoir entitled Nerd Do Well, charting his rise from a precocious kid scooting around Gloucestershire on a Raleigh Grifter, to jobbing stand-up comedian in London, to Tim in Spaced and Shaun in Shaun and Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek.

Britain has weathered a bit of a silly season for autobiographies: Peter Mandelson's near real-time account of the election last July, Tony Blair's long-awaited non-apology in early September, The Stig from Top Gear stirring absolutely nobody a fortnight later by revealing that under his identity-shrouding helmet he was an anonymous stunt driver of whom nobody had heard. Still, Pegg's book was a surprising sight in the catalogues, and having read an advance copy in the days before meeting him, I am suddenly in possession of all kinds of fascinating details I didn't expect to know.

There's the nervy thrill he got as a little boy when undressing his Lone Ranger action toy. The romantic break-up, in the mid-90s, to which he credits most of his career's oomph. The several near-encounters with his wife, Maureen, that preceded them meeting properly in an airport shuttle bus. Not to mention the circumstances of his first snog, grope, blowjob and shag (hooray!), this last event ushered in, apparently, by the back-to-back screening of Withnail and I and Evil Dead 2.

Even Nick Lyndhurst, in the end, sold a wedding to OK! magazine. Is this book a reverse of many years of principled privacy? "I didn't want to do a tell-all, stitch anyone up," Pegg tells me. "These are nuggets that I'm happy to part with; the kind of pub chat you share with people when you first meet them. Some people might want to hear stories from the set of Spaced or Shaun or whatever, but it's kind of boring. We went to work, we filmed, we had a laugh: there weren't any great adventures. I found that most of the interesting stuff was in the past."

So, for now, to the past. He grew up in Gloucester as Simon Beckingham, dad a key- board player in a local band and mum a member of an amateur dramatics troupe. The performative gene was passed down, and Pegg grew up a keen actor and joke-teller, obsessed with Jim Davidson and the musical Carousel, and in general a bit of a show-off. He had "a face that made aesthetic sense, as opposed to the frustrating Picasso adulthood has seen fit to furnish me with".

He became Simon Pegg in the mid-70s, after parental divorce and remarriage. The relationship between his mother and his stepfather was facilitated (crucial this) by Pegg's fledgling interest in sci-fi telly. Obsessed with the show The Six Million Dollar Man, he had asked his mum for a pair of red-and-white trainers like those worn by the programme's bionic man. His eventual stepfather ran the local shoe shop, and a first date with Pegg's mother was arranged on delivery of the bionic trainers to their front door. "Bouts of welcome unity" in a subsequently rocky relationship between Simon and Richard Pegg came, chiefly, when the two nerded-out together over films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark. For Pegg, cultural hobby-horsing and the demands of real life have always been fast entwined.

Star Wars has been the most consistent supplement and tonic, Pegg an impressionable eight-year-old when George Lucas's epic arrived in his local cinema in 1977. "I was the exact demographic for that film," he says. "I was a fucking 1m-high target, and it got me right through the eyes. I can mark out my life from that point in terms of my relationship with that film."

No exaggeration. A game of Jedi re-enactment in Gloucester's woodlands helped a youthful Pegg and his peers get over the death of a friend in a car accident. A socio- historical interpretation of the film with Ewoks as Vietnamese militia was his thesis subject as a film student at Bristol University. On one occasion, in hospital after an operation, Pegg awoke from his anaesthetically induced coma an hour too early, confounding doctors until it was realised he must have overheard a fellow patient on the ward watching Star Wars on VHS, jealously aroused by the sound of R2-D2's clicks and beeps.

The only influence given anything like equivalent life-defining status in his book is Nick Frost, a bearish east Londoner who has played Pegg's devoted, syrupy-witted best friend in much of their screen work together. It is a set-up that mirrors, foggily, the pair's relationship in real life. They were introduced by an ex-girlfriend of Pegg's who worked with Frost in a Mexican chain restaurant; she thought the two would get along, which they did, even though Pegg found Frost to be a kind of comedic Caliban – instinctively very funny, but pop-culturally illiterate. Unable to fathom a life without Harrison Ford, Doctor Who and Woody Allen, Pegg set about educating him in the ways of manic film and TV consumption.

It birthed an enduring friendship, close to the one they enacted on Spaced (all video marathons and PlayStation sessions and tea) which first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1999, with Pegg in the lead role as Tim and Frost as his friend Mike. The show, written by Pegg and co-star Jessica Hynes and directed by a then-unknown Edgar Wright, was bolstered by a prime Friday night spot just after Friends and became a hit, joining the pantheon of cult-adored TV that Pegg had long been a fan of himself.

At this point there was an early sign of his instinctive twitch towards privacy. Starting to get recognised, Pegg took to holing up of an evening in a scuzzy pub on the Archway Road, where he and Frost became such firm regulars they might take their shoes off to drink. One night they considered the hypothetical (and, you suppose, drunken) question: what would they do if zombies invaded their corner of north London right now? Frost imagined leaping across rooftops to a local football stadium, there to use the playing surface for farmland and enjoy a panoramic view of any approaching hordes. Pegg decided he'd stick in the pub and fight off the living dead from there. He made a mental note of the idea.

The girlfriend who introduced Pegg to Frost is named in his book, pseudonymously, as "Eggy Helen" (a private joke, says Pegg, but adding that in Spaced she inspired the character of Sarah, the woman who dumps his character in the first episode). In real life that relationship ended with "a small amount of blood and broken glass" when Pegg was dumped and, in response, put his fist through a glass window. Having to get his smashed knuckles repaired in hospital is a moment returned to time and again in the memoirs, a nadir in his life, but also a turning point. "It was a wake-up call," he says. "I was in a relationship, it was very comfortable, and I got sluggish. It was only when I got cut free that things got busy. I can track it from that point exactly – everything went 'Whoosh!'"

Whoosh: after two successful series of Spaced, Pegg made Shaun of the Dead with Edgar Wright as co-writer and director, and Frost as co-star. The film was set mainly in a pub just like the Archway boozer where the idea had first been born, but parochialism harmed it none, and Shaun won praise from the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson and zombie-film doyen George A Romero on its US cinema release. Dazzling endorsement made Shaun an absolute smash on DVD, selling so well in America that distributors Universal were later able to compile the astonishing statistic that 40% of US males aged 17 to 39 considered themselves fans.

Whoosh: one minute Pegg was joking to a British magazine that, despite this, he was hardly in a position to fly out to LA and make Mission Impossible III ("an imaginary blockbuster that I plucked out of the air to demonstrate my disdain for Hollywood ephemera"), the next he was cast as weapons technician Benji Dunn in Mission Impossible III. That film was directed by JJ Abrams, who, soon afterwards, went to work on a reimagining of the Star Trek film series, pinging Pegg a one-line email that said, "Do you want to play Scotty?" He did, and in the gaps between all this, starred in David Schwimmer's directorial debut Run Fatboy Run (2007) and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People with Kirsten Dunst (2008), as well as making another film with Wright, the action-movie pastiche Hot Fuzz (2007). Now his upcoming slate includes sequels to Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, a role in the next Narnia film and the John Landis-directed Burke and Hare, which is out in the UK next week.

Then there's the Spielberg film. One of the first people he told when he got the part, says Pegg, was his stepfather Richard, nodding back to their days of watching Indiana Jones films together. Due out in 2011, The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, will employ a kind of motion-captured animation similar to that used to realise Gollum on screen in Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Pegg will be rendered on screen as one half of Tintin's moustachioed detective partners, the Thompson twins. Frost, fittingly, will play the other twin. "It's the perfect way to represent our symbiotic careers," says Pegg. "We finally become the same person, appearing on screen with the same head."

Was it around the time of a stardom-confirming nod from Spielberg and Jackson that he began scribbling down incidents and anecdotes for the autobiography? No, says Pegg, he was reluctant at first and had to be talked into it by his publisher. The resultant work – an enjoyable read – was slowly lured from him over 12 weeks, Pegg parked at a computer next to his editor for seven hours a day. "I see these biographies come out, and there's a feeling of 'Who do you think you are?'" says Pegg. "It seems so awfully presumptuous to think anyone would give a shit about my life."

I am braced for the canine swerve at any moment. I have asked a question about his wife, and Pegg is reminiscing – with only minimal signs of sweaty agitation – about the first time they met.

It happened after several near-misses. Maureen, at the time a publicist for Sony Music, had been in the same place as Pegg on a few occasions without their actual meeting; prior to that she'd always felt mildly irked by him, from a distance, because of an ex-boyfriend's penchant for sacking off their Friday nights to stay in and watch Spaced. Booked on to the same holiday package to Thessalonica in Greece in 2000, Pegg and Maureen missed each other again in the departure lounge, then throughout a week in the city, finally how-do-you-doing on the shuttle bus riding home from the airport. They were married in 2005, and had a daughter last year.

"If I had matured in such a way that had stopped me thinking that sitting at the back of the bus was cool then I would never have met her," says Pegg. "But she went to sit at the back, too – she had the same impulses as me. That's quantum attraction in action."

Quantum whuh? It is a term that crops up in his book, and I ask Pegg to explain it a little more. The inner geek flares; his hands start making shapes. "It's a notion that attraction might actually be maths – but chaotic, fabulous maths. Not fate as some sort of ordained puppet master, rather a consequence of millions of micro-decisions happening simultaneously, drawing people towards each other. It explains how you come across the like-minded, even if it feels like coincidence, dependent on weird things you attribute to fate, but which might actually be assisted coincidence."

Yikes. "It's not as crystal-precise as a timepiece," he continues, "and it doesn't always work. Sometimes you're brought together, but you don't meet – Edgar and I worked out we were in the same cinema watching the same film five years before we met. Me and Maureen were at the same gigs or dating the same people, but always missing each other. You might get to within a metre of your soulmate, but for some reason that last little inch you don't make. I've met mine, and I'm very lucky. But the whole process of quantum attraction – it's like a drunk with a shotgun."

He really does speak like this, an infectious, sprawling swirl of ideas; the training, I guess, of many hundreds of hours of pub-talk with Frost. I find myself nodding and wincing and agreeing and wanting to order a couple of pints up to continue the discussion with the dictaphone off. But it stays on, and I'm emboldened enough by Pegg's candidness to ask about his friendship with Chris Martin. It seems significant, somehow, that two unassuming West Country boys should enjoy such outrageous success, having known each other before they both became globally famous. Is this quantum… "It's the quantum attraction thing again," says Pegg. "We met because we were both going to do what we did, because we were on a similar path."

They chummed up about a decade ago, meeting first at a Toploader gig Pegg attended through Maureen's work and bonding over a love of This is Spinal Tap, plus a shared awkwardness in the face of increasing public renown. Their career trajectories had followed a similar curve and would steepen sharply at about the same time: two Englishmen quickly making good, fast, in America. Pegg explains it as "people with a similar drive, similar interests, similar impulses, being drawn together for that very reason".

Does he feel, then, that he was always destined for fame?

"I sort of blithely walk through everything. When I started doing stand-up, I didn't have a five year-plan. Eddie Izzard famously had a five year-plan, of what he wanted to do, what he wanted to get out of it. I didn't, I just took it as it came. When we were getting Shaun ready I didn't worry that it wouldn't ever get made, I just assumed it would. Whether that was optimism or naivety, I don't know. Probably the latter."

He is comfortable enough, for a time, to talk about a few more of his showbiz pals. David Walliams is roped into the quantum attraction, you-meet-the-people-who-are-going-to-better-you theory ("It was very obvious to me that David was going to be a successful comedian when I knew him at university, and if anybody was going to get anywhere it was gonna be David"). And he enjoys a good giggle on relating the news that Martin Freeman has been cast in the lead role in The Hobbit, the prospect of his friend having to endure the sci-fi convention circuit absolutely delighting him. "Martin's the anti-me: a soul aficionado and a vinyl junkie – absolutely not a resident of the geek universe. Not the type of person who will relish the attention he'll get for being Bilbo Baggins. Ha!"

The interview draws to a close. We talk a bit about time travel, then about The X Factor. I feel that I've got to know him a little bit, admittedly aided by the lubricant of his memoirs and his commitment to publicise it. The Schnauzer hasn't even had a look-in. Curious, after all, I ask about Minnie. She's doing well, says Pegg. "She still likes eating socks."