Status Anxiety

4 October 2008

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

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 self-disciplined — 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?