Simon Says

An interview with Simon Pegg

by Shaun Brady

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Toby Young as described by Toby Young in his memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is an insufferable prick. Even when he's self-deprecatingly referring to his past self as an insufferable prick, his narrative voice still comes off as insufferable prick. But that wasn't the Toby Young that Simon Pegg met when he sat down with the writer he was set to portray on screen.

"I was expecting a lot more of an obnoxious, tenacious self-promoter," Pegg says, on the phone from a Dallas hotel room. "I'm sure he is that to a degree, but the guy I met was a pretty mellow, sweet guy who I really liked."

That impression may have something to do with the much tamer Toby who shows up under the name Sidney Young in the film adaptation of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (maybe not as much as Hollywood's timidity concerning unpleasant protagonists, surely, but something). Pegg insists that Young had to become more likable for the film.

"With a movie you have 90 minutes or so to go on a complete journey," he says, "and I think you'd be top-loading the film if you made him that unlikable. You'd have a lot more work to do in redeeming him. He is a complete jerk, but he learns a lesson and through that you start to see the nicer side of him."

Pegg says he expects to continue working with director Edgar Wright — a collaboration that produced Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and the British TV show Spaced — despite solo success. He is working on Paul — a road comedy co-written with his Shaun and Fuzz co-star Nick Frost, to be directed by Superbad's Greg Mottola. And he's playing Scotty in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot.

"I've been very out as an [Star Trek] enthusiast, because Spaced obviously pinned me as a geek," Pegg says. "So it was amazing to be part of that whole universe. To be a grown man acting not just with Leonard Nimoy, but with that character who I've known since I was a child, is just mind-blowing."

While he relishes his sudden success, Pegg does find it all overwhelming at times. "Now that everything's so clamorous, I love the idea of quiet. I have this fantasy about fixing a boat. I think it's because of the end of The Shawshank Redemption. So when things get just too much and I can't quite deal, I just think, 'I'm going to fuck off to Greece and mend a boat.'"

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

See Shaun Brady's review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.