Status Anxiety

4 October 2008

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

‘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.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.