‘The First Time’ With Simon Pegg
“The first album I bought was probably Love, by the Cult,” Simon Pegg says in our latest installment of The First Time video interview series. The screenwriter, actor, and self-professed music nerd dove into some of his post-punk favorites while promoting his new film, the thriller Inheritance, in which he stars with Lily Collins and Connie Nielson, and which is premieres on May 22nd.
“I’d just started to become a bit of a goth,” he says of Love. “‘She Sells Sanctuary’ was the big hit off of that one, and said everything that I needed to be told at that age: Wear black.”
Pegg also discusses the first audition he ever did (for The Music Man), the first few times he performed on the BBC’s The Stand-Up Show (along with Jon Stewart), and the first time he visited the United States. “January 1994: My girlfriend and I had capitalized on an offer that the vacuum cleaner manufacturer Hoover had floated, a slightly ill-conceived idea where if you bought a Hoover for 99 pounds sterling, you’d get a free return flight to New York City.”
Fans of Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End) will be pleased to hear the story of how he met Nick Frost, or how the duo came up with the idea for the pub scene in Shaun of the Dead. Pegg later explains his relationship with both Star Wars and Doctor Who — they go back further than you might think — and his first time meeting Tom Cruise for the Mission: Impossible series.
On his latest role, Pegg says, “Inheritance is the first time I’ve really gone to town and changed my appearance so dramatically. But it was worth it; it was fun. I didn’t do it unhealthily, it wasn’t like I just starved myself … Totally unsustainable, though, my wife cried when she saw me because she thought I looked ill.”