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player ready...British actor Simon Pegg thinks that “actors become idiots” because they are treated like royalty.
“You’re driven everywhere, and you’re put up in really nice places,” he said. “The actors that turn into idiots are the ones that start believing it’s because they deserve it, not because they’re just not trusted, which is the truth.
“The truth is, actors are flaky, unreliable and mostly unstable people, and they need to be mollycoddled at all times.”
Pegg, the star and co-writer of the cult hits “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” is not the type to be mollycoddled.
“I’m a very regular sort of person,” he said.
Everyman is the description most often appended to his performances, and he likes to sell himself as down to earth, a genre junkie — a fanboy even — not too different from the legions of guys who go around quoting from his comedies and parroting them on YouTube.
His relationship with Nick Frost, his best friend and co-star in both films, was founded on a reference to an obscure “Star Wars” character. Edgar Wright, another close friend and the director and co-writer of the films, first wanted to work with Pegg because of his redneck jokes (or the British equivalent thereof).
And Pegg plays the somewhat schlubby loser in his new movie, “Run, Fatboy, Run,” a romantic comedy directed by David Schwimmer that opens Friday.
But to watch the women flocking around him at a recent screening, it’s clear that Pegg is more than just geek material. For one thing, in real life, he’s a flab-free platinum blond who favors tight-fitting T-shirts and is married to a music publicist. For another, after years as a stand-up comedian, he still has ambitions that drive him to write, act and produce, sometimes simultaneously.
Now Pegg, 38, is moving into celebrity-treatment territory. His forthcoming roles include the lead, with Kirsten Dunst and Jeff Bridges, in “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” and a turn as Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Trek” movie, due out next year.
OK, so he hasn’t left geekdom totally behind. But no matter. It’s the Judd Apatow era of the nerd hero: “ordinary blokes doing extraordinary things,” as Pegg says.
In “Run, Fatboy, Run” he plays Dennis, an underemployed scruffy charmer who runs from his pregnant fiance (Thandie Newton) at the altar. She has the baby, and the story picks up again several years later, when she is dating the perfect man (Hank Azaria as a rich marathon runner).
To win back her affection and the respect of his son, Pegg’s character decides to compete against the boyfriend in a race. Cue the hilarious training sequence.
The first feature directed by Schwimmer, it is a triple threat of feel-good genres: first-date movie, broad physical comedy and underdog sports flick. Michael Ian Black, the comedian and veteran of the TV shows “The State” and “Stella,” wrote the original screenplay, and Pegg did rewrites to transfer the story to London from New York.
It’s nothing like “Shaun of the Dead,” a zombie satire, or “Hot Fuzz,” a sendup of police action movies, and that was the point.
“It’s broader than what I’ve done before, it’s more conventional,” Pegg said. “But I think it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of a popcorn movie, a Saturday night film to go and just genuinely enjoy it as entertainment.”