Status Anxiety

4 October 2008

Disciplined, cheerful, humble and truly nice -— Simon Pegg is everything I’m not

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.’