Actor Simon Pegg fought zombies in Shaun of the Dead, tracked killers in Hot Fuzz and plays boozing-and-brawling engineer Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek movie.
But before he tackled those big-screen roles, his comic U.K. television show Spaced chronicled geek culture in the ’90s. The single-camera show followed the daily lives of twenty-something slackers Tim (played by Pegg) and Daisy (show co-creator and co-writer Jessica Hynes), two complete strangers who posed as a couple in order to get an apartment.
Crammed with references to Star Wars and Resident Evil, Spaced became hugely popular in Britain. On Tuesday, a DVD set brings the show to the United States for the first time. Pegg, Hynes and the show’s director, Edgar Wright, kick off a four-city U.S. tour Monday to promote the DVD.
Wired.com talked with Pegg about Spaced ‘s deep geek cred, the beauty of American sci-fi and the outrageous possibility of making a good odd-numbered Star Trek movie.
Wired.com: U.S. audiences haven’t had much of a chance to see Spaced. Can you tell me a little bit about the show and what the inspiration was to create it at the time?
Simon Pegg: When we wrote it, me and [co-writer and co-star] Jess were looking at television in the late ’90s and there wasn’t a sitcom that was aimed at twenty-somethings. Everything was really off the mark. It was brightly lit sets with attractive people talking about sex. It was inaccurate. There was a lot more to it than sex. We weren’t being spoken to. As a viewer, I enjoy being spoken to very specifically. It’s amazing when you connect on a personal level. We said: "Let’s write something’s that specific to our own experience."
Wired.com: And there wasn’t really anything out there that spoke to geek culture, either.
Pegg: It just happened to be that geek culture is who we were. Other comedies weren’t appealing to us because we didn’t know the people in the other shows. We said: "Let’s write a comedy about us."
Wired.com: Geek culture was a little outside the mainstream at the time, though. Were you surprised when so many people related to it?
Pegg: I had a feeling that it would connect. The feeling of "getting it" without being helped is really gratifying. We always put [geek references] in [the show] which were willingly difficult to get.
I remember seeing E.T. when I was a kid and remember the bit when they go out on Halloween and E.T. sees some kid dressed as Yoda and they dropped in the Yoda theme from Empire and I remember recognizing and getting it. Jess and me wanted that to happen throughout Spaced.
We were talking to a less specific group of literate twenty-somethings that had grown up consuming popular culture. The last thing we wanted to do was talk down to people. We wanted to show the experience of being that age.
Wired.com: Do you think it’s still relatable even though it’s been nearly seven years since the show aired?
Pegg: I think that the grander themes are eternal. It’s about friendship and love. It is a little bit of a time capsule — it’s very millennial, that period of time. But as a historical document it’s still relatable. The references are quite classic. The Star Wars references are getting a little tired, and who knew The Matrix was going to be so bad? There will also be stuff like British TV references that the American audiences won’t pick up on.
Wired.com: There have only been a few episodes shown on U.S. television. But geeks have a way of getting their hands on geek culture. Do you think it’s likely that a fan base already exists here for it?
Pegg: There’s a large amount of people that have seen it because of the fan base we have been able to gather from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz — they have gone out and imported it. There’s a huge American presence. They get it. Because it went that far in order to try and not underestimate the audience. The audience will be perfectly capable of relating to it even if there’s occasionally something they don’t get. I mean, that happens to me on The Simpsons and I still love it. We wanted to write it so that even if you didn’t get a single movie reference you’d still get it.
Wired.com: Do you think that’s because, in a way, geek slackers are the same the world over?
Pegg: It’s a global tribe — we’re all really into the same stuff. It would be entertaining for the American audience to see there are geeks like them in far-off lands. I know from going to comic conventions — people whose interests in genre film and TV are pretty the much the same.
Wired.com: You got some big Hollywood geeks to do commentary on the DVD — Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Matt Stone. Were they already fans of the show?
Pegg: They were already friends of ours. I was thrilled that they’d seen the show. We gave it to Quentin and Kevin for them to enjoy. We owe them gratitude because they influenced us as filmmakers and writers.
It was wonderful [doing the commentary on the episode] when Daisy comes in and finds the gun and we do the Pulp Fiction sequence. It was great to do with Quentin only seven years later. His quote was brilliant. He lifted his own quote from Jackie Brown: "The one, the only, Spaced. Accept no substitutes." He’s an encyclopedia. He’s the ultimate Spaced viewer. He gets every single reference.
Wired.com: Now that you’ve branched out to working in other countries, you have a unique view of the sci-fi world. Do you think there are any big differences between U.S. sci-fi and British sci-fi?
Pegg: You guys have the best sci-fi in the world. You also have the capacity to do it, as well. You get to make shows like Heroes.
Wired.com: But what about Doctor Who? That’s a fantastic and iconic British sci-fi show.
Pegg: Doctor Who is an interesting example. It’s finally getting the production values it deserves. But American sci-fi is frontierism again in space. It’s thrusting and powering forward and gaining new territory. We just don’t have the sort of resources to do shows like that.
Wired.com: But you guys have the sci-fi comedy thing down, and we can’t seem to do that.
Pegg: In terms of films, and even TV, the comedy thing is because we’ve been forced to withdraw a little bit and keep it small and try other techniques.
It has a lot to do with national psyche. The U.S. has a significant role to play globally and a precarious position. Fantasy always reflects our own real lives. You can apply that to nations as well. If you look at Star Wars, it is interesting to think about if another Star Wars would come along post-Iraq. After Vietnam, you have a nation that’s confused in this conflict of blurring the boundaries of good and evil. Star Wars celebrated America in space. The good people wore white and the bad guys wore black. Star Wars is a reflection of post-Vietnam paranoia.
You can argue that point through the ’80s and ’90s with movies like The Fly, which showed the enemy being inside, with the rise of AIDS. Now the enemies are among us, with a rise in terrorism, and the zombies came back big time — they’re your neighbors.
Doctor Who is our longest-running sci-fi program. It’s an interesting show as well because it has such a clever mythology. The Doctor regenerates. But then so is Star Trek in terms of being a groundbreaking and intelligent piece.
Wired.com: Speaking of Star Trek… in an episode of Spaced, your character Tim says that there are some things in life that are just fact. And one of those facts is that every odd-numbered Star Trek movie is shit. But now you’re about to star in Star Trek XI.
Pegg: Obviously there are exceptions to every rule. It isn’t a universal constant. I have been made to participate in my own wrong proving. Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass.
J.J. Abrams has this habit of putting me in the position of making me eat my own words. When I was doing press for Shaun of the Dead, a journalist asked me if I was going to go off to Hollywood now. I said: "I’m not gonna just run off and do some film like Mission: Impossible III." I just made up a film. Four months later, J.J. calls me and asks me if I wanted to be in Mission: Impossible III and I was like: "Yes!" Oh what a fool.
This odd-numbered film is going to be amazing.
Wired.com: The historical character of Scotty is a bit of a stereotype. He’s a Scottish engineer, named Scotty, who loves to drink. Did you need to update the character at all in the way you played him to make him more PC?
Pegg: In some respects he’s a racial stereotype. But, I know plenty of Scottish people who like a bit of a drink and have the surname Scott.
It’s very important to be sensitive and not make generalizations about groups of people, but you can be oversensitive. Scotty’s a very affectionate stereotype. He’s a popular character in Scotland. He’s not a negative stereotype — he’s a fun stereotype. The differences between ourselves can be very funny. But Scotts are the first people to laugh at the fact that they drink and fight a bit.
It’s also not an accident that the chief engineer on the Enterprise is Scottish. An enormous amount of extremely important inventions came out of Scotland. The Scottish engineer is in the tradition of John Logie Baird, who invented the TV, or Alexander Graham Bell.
Wired.com: So you were OK with playing him as a stereotype without parodying him?
Pegg: Certainly not parodying him. It was just a question of playing him. I approached the part like James [Doohan, the original Scotty] did when he got the part. To look at who he is. He’s an accomplished engineer, a bit cheeky, likes a drink and a brawl.
Wired.com: Right, but it’s hard to imagine how you can play the part without mimicking the original character. The same thing goes for Chris Pine, who plays Captain Kirk in the new film. How do you do Kirk without doing Shatner?
Pegg: Going into it I thought the same stuff. How are all these other actors going to take on characters where the actor is as famous as the character? Shatner and Nimoy, they inhabited those roles with such conviction and such skill. All you can do is play the part in the spirit of those actors — not take it lightly or parody it. Watching Chris Pine, and all the actors, I had skin-tingly moments. I saw them doing their stuff and thought: They’ve got this so fucking right. Chris had that swagger, and confidence, and big-balls-ness, and I think he nailed it.
Wired.com: Speaking of parodies, with Spaced, and Shaun, and Hot Fuzz you seem to create all these loving parodies. They all come from a place of real fandom — which is maybe why they are so successful. But have you ever thought about doing a genre movie that’s not a parody but more a new addition to the genre?
Pegg: Well, we never really look at the movies as parodies. Shaun of the Dead isn’t a parody, it’s a zombie film. I suppose there are elements of Hot Fuzz that are more parodist then Shaun of the Dead that can’t help but be seen as parody.
The next thing that Nick Frost and I have written is something which is a genre film and not a parody. It has a science fiction story line. I’m so happy with it as well, I think it might be the best thing we’ve ever written. It’s called Paul . It’s up on IMDB. We’ve got this director we really want to work with, but I can’t quite talk about it yet. If he signs on it will be a great crossover between our lot and your lot.
Wired.com: So, on a totally geeky and unrelated note, we’ve been spending a lot of time around the office talking about the rumors that David Tennant is getting ready to leave Doctor Who . When we start listing our favorite British actors to play the part, your name falls at the top of our list. Since you’ve already been on the show, have they approached you? Would you do it if they asked?
Pegg: Being the Doctor? I don’t think I’d do it for two reasons. One, I’m really loving doing movies. I’m really enjoying working in the States. You have an incredible work ethic. Second, I really love Doctor Who and I’d hate to have to sit down every Saturday night and have it be me. David’s done such an incredible job, he’s gonna be a tough act to follow. It would feel awful if I just went and balled up the franchise by just being rubbish.
Also, I think I’m gonna start drawing disdain from my own people. I’ve recently been ticking off geek things. I’m gonna be in Star Trek! My whole life is a geek wish-fulfillment trip.
It’s funny because it still amazes me. I haven’t grown accustomed to it. I met Spielberg recently and chatted with him about stuff. I was very cool and we had a brilliant talk and inside I was screaming like a child.
Photos courtesy BBC
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