Simon Pegg’s Impossible Mission

If planet earth has one ultimate fanboy, it would probably be the actor and screenwriter Simon Pegg. The title of his memoir is Nerd Do Well, after all. He grew up in the 1970s and 80s devouring Hollywood genre movies. So when he and his friends Edgar Wright and Nick Frost decided to make a movie, what came out was Shaun of the Dead, a brilliant homage to and parody of the zombie films of their youth. They followed that with Hot Fuzz, a buddy cop parody, and The World’s End, about some old friends’ nostalgic pub crawl interrupted by an alien invasion.

Meanwhile, Simon Pegg became a fixture in actual Hollywood action fantasy blockbusters. In his latest, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation he returns to the role of Benji Dunn, the techie sidekick he played in Mission: Impossible III (2006) and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011). The character has gone from behind-the-scenes fixer to out-front secret agent over the three films. “There’s been a real evolution since I first played this character, and it’s been fun to track that,” Pegg says. “Benji is a great way into the action for the audience. He’s not a superhero. He’s very much an ordinary person who finds himself in an extraordinary situation.”

Pegg remains a science-fiction fan, but he got himself into hot water earlier this year for some comments (that he says were taken out of context) about the way adults now consume movies and shows about superheroes and aliens. “I’m a participant in that,” he says. “A lot of my interests are things which might have been deemed childish.” But, he points out, the best fantasy and sci-fi movies base their stories on real-world concerns. “If you’re going to have these amazing spectacle films, it’s great to underpin them with some thought,” Pegg explains. “They’ve always been about us, and say things about what we’re scared of, what we’re preoccupied with. So for it to just be about robots fighting, that’s a bit of a waste.”