Disciplined, cheerful, humble and truly nice -— Simon Pegg is everything I’m not
It is a strange experience interviewing the actor who has just played you in the film of your life. Simon Pegg has been cast as yours truly in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the first thing he does is remind me that there is a scene in the film in which he makes a complete hash of an interview with a famous actor. That inevitably raises the question: if I mess up this interview, and the makers of the sequel want to include this scene in the film, who will be cast as ‘Simon Pegg’?
I may be getting ahead of myself here. It is a little premature to discuss the sequel before the original film has even come out. (It is released on 3 October.) I am trying not to let the experience of being played by Britain’s No. 1 box office star go to my head and, in that regard, Simon is a good role model. For instance, when I stepped out on to the red carpet with him at the Cannes Film Festival, and the flashbulbs started popping, he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you just hate this?’ In all honesty, I’m not quite there yet, Simon.
Throughout the making of How to Lose Friends, I have always been a bit sceptical about these sorts of remarks. At first, I simply refused to take his apparent niceness at face value. He has such a loyal and devoted fan base after the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz that he can green-light a movie at the click of his fingers. Indeed, it was only after he agreed to play the lead in How to Lose Friends that all the other pieces fell into place. But by the same token, he also has the power to sink the project simply by withdrawing his services. ‘Yes, he seems like a very decent guy, but don’t be fooled by that,’ I thought. ‘One wrong word from you and it’s curtains.’ It is almost like being in the presence of Zeus, who for a laugh is pretending to be mortal.
In spite of my scepticism, though, he keeps on confounding my expectations. At the party for the film last week, for instance, I found him ensconced in the VIP section with two radio competition winners from Dublin. One of them had buttonholed him to ask for an autograph and, when Simon discovered how far he and his friend had come, he decided to take them into the VIP section, get them each a drink and talk to them for 45 minutes.
‘I often try and put myself in the fans’ shoes,’ says Simon. ‘I think, if I had won a competition to get to the premiere and the star of the film let me into the room and gave me a cocktail, that would be really cool. And I get a kind of vicarious thrill from it. I remember having been a big fan of Star Wars when I was growing up and if Mark Hamill had ever emailed me and said, “Hi Simon”, I would have gone nuts. You just have to always remember what it was like for you when you were in that position.’ The fact that Simon has a reputation for being ‘the nicest man in show business’ has been a disaster for me. In interview after interview, he is asked how on earth someone so universally loved has been able to play someone so universally loathed. Even the director, Bob Weide, is fond of contrasting Simon’s likeable persona with that of the unscrupulous rascal he has been cast as. During the pre-production phase, whenever anyone asked Bob how he was going to turn such a despicable character into someone the audience would root for, he always gave the same reply: ‘Two words: Simon Pegg.’ ‘It’s been fun,’ says Simon, when I pose the same question. ‘It has been really good playing a character who just doesn’t care about how he’s perceived. It’s a classic British character actually, it’s the person who continually disappoints, but you want him to do well. It’s Basil Fawlty, it’s David Brent, it’s Captain Mainwaring, it’s the lovable loser kind of guy.’ So how does Simon go about transforming a ‘loathsome narcissist’ into an ‘endearing’ person, as the Evening Standard reviewer put it? To a certain extent, it is in the writing. No matter how selfish and insensitive a character is, if you stick him in a hostile universe in which one disaster befalls him after another, he will elicit the audience’s sympathy.
But it is also due to Simon’s performance. Unlike Britain’s other two Hollywood exports with whom he is often lumped together — Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen — Simon is not a comedian trying to act, but a classically trained actor doing comedy. I accompanied Simon to Friday Night With Jonathan Ross last week and, in the green room, I spoke to his mother, Gill Pegg. According to her, Simon always exhibited a great flair for acting — she is a keen amateur actress herself — and she managed to secure a grant from her local village in Gloucestershire to send him to drama college in Stratford when he was just 16. While there, he received a grounding in the classics, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, among other roles.
‘He went up on the National Express coach every Sunday night and he came back on Friday evening,’ she says. ‘It was one of the hardest things I had to do and I probably cried every time I put him on the coach — of course it was hard, but that was what I knew he wanted to do. But look what I’ve reaped in reward.’ One of Simon’s most noticeable characteristics — something I’ve witnessed again and again during the making of the film — is his extraordinary focus. He is preternaturally selfdisciplined — a driven, hard-working professional — and he clearly gets this from his mother. Is he fulfilling the ambitions that she nurtured for herself as a young woman?
‘I don’t think she’s a stage mother, if that’s what you mean,’ he says. ‘It’s more about making sure that all the effort she put in was worthwhile. She let me leave home when it was just her, me and Katy, my younger sister. It pleases me to be able to call her and tell her I’ve just been in a room with Steven Spielberg. I don’t know how much of a vicarious thrill she gets from it... there’s a sadness there, because she’s only one generation away from being able to do it herself. I realised quite early on that I could do this, I could make a living from this, whereas I don’t think Mum ever had that epiphany. I was going to be a vet, if you can believe it.’ I can believe it. Simon is ‘a giver, not a taker’, as his mother says. Before I got to know him, I assumed he would be like the Baby Herman character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: a cherubic innocent on camera but, once a wrap had been called, a cigar-smoking tyrant, screaming at his assistant for not getting him the right brand of bottled water. I just couldn’t believe that anyone could possibly be that nice. But he is. He really is.
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