Simon Pegg is a two-time member of the illustrious Tom Cruise cake club.
Sure, he gets the famed coconut cake each Christmas like various other A-listers. But he also receives a festive gingerbread house from the star. Technically, however, this cake is for Pegg’s teenage daughter.
“Tom’s known her since she was a baby, so I think he still thinks of her as a little kid,” Pegg says with the polite smile of someone who, given the opportunity, might prefer a more grown-up dessert.
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There was also one time when Cruise had his people call up a bakery at the foot of the mountain in the Alps where Pegg was snowboarding and order a special birthday cake for him. “He just knew I was there and had it sent up to the chalet where I was staying… he’s very thoughtful and has a very big heart.” The snowboard, it should be noted, was also a birthday present from Cruise.
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This sort of globe-spanning mostly-gateau-based gift-giving is all part and parcel of being friends with the biggest movie star on the planet — and a two-decade member of his elite “Mission: Impossible” squad. But it’s a squad that, after a $4-billion-plus-earning spectacle of insurance-busting stunts (almost all Cruise’s), is now disbanding.
For Pegg, however, “The Final Reckoning” — getting a special screening in Cannes — isn’t simply the eighth and last instalment of a series that elevated him from rising cult figure in the U.K. and into the inner circle of Hollywood’s elite (most notably — after Cruise — JJ Abrams, who, alongside “Mission Impossible,” brought him along for rides in Star Trek and Star Wars). It’s also a franchise that, as he acknowledges, helped turn his life around.
Pegg’s speaking on a sunny day from a spacious wooden office at the back of his estate in a leafy village almost an hour’s drive north of London. Is this the house — and adjoining land — that “Mission: Impossible” built? “Well, some of it,” he laughs. “But it’s my career … of which ‘Mission: Impossible is a seminal part of.”
He’s lounging on a comfy sofa in the center while stroking Bramwell, one of two pet Schnauzer dogs (named after the Brontë brother — Pegg’s wife is a “huge Brontës fan”). While it’s described an office, the building is much more of a museum, the walls covered in movie posters and fan art and shelves heavy in toys, models and other paraphernalia, all related to films Pegg’s appeared in — and many featuring his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Nick Frost (and most directed by his other frequent collaborator, Edgar Wright).
On the wall behind Pegg as he chats hangs a frame housing a blood-splattered short-sleeved white shirt and red tie from his 2005 zombie comedy breakout “Shaun of the Dead” (one of several, he explains — “Peter Jackson also has one”). Periodically, Bramwell leaps up from Pegg’s lap to bark at his own reflection in the glass.
Off all the memorabilia on display, “Shaun of the Dead” — which Pegg led and co-wrote with Wright and became the first in their so-called “Cornetto Trilogy” (also including “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End”) — dominates. It’s easy to understand why. The film is now regarded as a classic, the blood-splattered shirt a go-to Halloween costume for those who aren’t looking to put in a huge amount of effort. It’s also the feature that, for Pegg, kicked everything off — and led directly to “Mission Impossible” in what he describes as “pure stunt casting.”
“Mission Impossible 3” had already been through a couple of directors before Cruise placed it in the hands of Abrams, best known at the time for spy thriller series “Alias.” Coincidentally, around the same time as the then-rising filmmaker came aboard the project in late 2004, a low-budget British indie in which Pegg helps fight off a horde of zombies from inside a London pub was beginning to make waves across the Atlantic, developing something of a following among several industry heavyweights.
“I remember turning up for the ‘Shaun of the Dead’ premiere at the ArcLight on Sunset and Edgar was sat there with Quentin Tarantino,” recalls Pegg. “There were lots of cool people there, and we got such a lot of support from Quentin and George Romero and John Carpenter and Stephen King and Peter Jackson … all these guys sort of stepped up for us — I think because they saw a lot of themselves in Edgar.”
Abrams wasn’t at the premiere, but he was at the Saturn Awards in May 2005 where “Shaun of the Dead” won best horror. While he didn’t meet Pegg at the time — “I think he meant to say ‘Hi,’ but didn’t manage to” — he instead phoned him directly in London a few weeks later to offer him the role of “Mission: Impossible’s” IT nerd and comic foil Benji (a name he admits is more commonly given, at least in the U.K., “to a dog”).
“I think he just thought: Oh, he’ll be funny, let’s get him in,” says Pegg, who was writing “Hot Fuzz” with Wright in their London office when the unexpected call came through. “And he literally just said, ‘Hey, do you want to come out and do a little bit of ‘Mission Impossible 3,’ it’ll be really fun.”
Pegg describes Abrams as the “king of back-channelling” for his tendency to cut out agents completely with his direct casting enquiries (several years later, he would invite Pegg to join the “Star Trek” franchise with the simple emailed message, “Do you want to play Scottie?”)
And so, just a few months after the call in November 2005, Pegg found himself on the Paramount lot in LA, meeting Cruise for the very first time and shooting scenes for one of the biggest action franchises of all time. His first day: reciting an “an eight-page fucking monologue” about an unknown terror threat known as the Rabbit’s Foot he’d “only had the morning to learn.”
Pegg was, as he notes, in “the apotheosis of my life ambitions, my dreams as a kid, a situation I’d never even thought I’d find myself in … being in Hollywood, where they made the films that I grew up loving.”
But he was also “deeply unhappy,” unable to appreciate the experience.
“What I was ultimately dealing with was depression, which I was trying to manage by anaesthetising myself. It was less of being alcoholic, more being dependent on the sensation,” he explains.
That first, career-changing day on set with Cruise he spent “slightly hungover and feeling a little bit wired … I remember not being particularly present, because I was so inside my own head that it was hard to actually relax and enjoy it.”
Back at the hotel after the shoot, he went straight to the bar.
It was, he says, a “nihilistic, self-destructive impulse.”
But where the pressures of Pegg’s first “Mission Impossible” outing had perhaps contributed to his condition (which he’d had off and on since his teenage years), his second would help him get on top of it.
For 2011’s “Ghost Protocol,” his role had been upped considerably, with Benji dragged away from his drab office job, given a gun and sent out into the field with Cruise and co (again via a solitary rep-circumventing email from Abrams that read, “How would feel if Benji was an agent?”). By this time, the production was also aware of what Pegg had been battling off-screen — and went to great lengths to support him as he sought recovery.
“They had a sober companion for me — and just really looked after me,” he says, singling out Abrams and incoming director Brad Bird for their efforts. “I felt very taken care of and felt valued, because they bothered to do that.”
Cruise also got involved, telling Pegg: “You’re going to get in shape for this film — you’re an agent now!” He jokes that anyone carefully watching a scene in which the two of them walk across Red Square might notice that he drops 20lbs in a single edit.
“I kind of found this joy in looking after myself and just realizing that if I ate well and went to the gym I could actually feel good,” he says. “So I credit ‘Mission’ with rescuing me — because it gave me real focus at a time when I needed focus. And I just had the best time on ‘Ghost Protocol.’”
Pegg’s now been sober since 2010.
Three films on and with “Mission: Impossible” now in the rear-view mirror, Pegg has been plotting a life away from his irregular battles with global terror threats.
There’s a directorial debut in the works, a book he’s adapted and is trying to get off the ground that he can’t yet discuss (although he states “I don’t want to be in it”).
But he wouldn’t look to produce that through his own company. Stolen Picture, the production banner he set up with Frost in 2016 may have been recently shuttered by Sony, but its founders had long since left the building after one film and two TV shows. “I think Nick and I were like, wait, this is like running a business — this isn’t being creative, it’s fucking office work,” he says. “I’m fortunate enough to do my hobby as a job that’s not my hobby — running a company is not my hobby.”
This hobby will undoubtedly extend to more projects with both Frost and Wright, he says. “It’s just a question of when, not if.”
Wright was recently at Pegg’s house for three days, the two of them “trying to settle on a basic premise for something.” Pegg says he’s “promised” his friend he “wouldn’t make another comedy before they work together.”
Whatever they do do together, he says it’ll likely surprise anyone who has followed their previous films, especially those still making frequent calls for some sort of “Shaun of the Dead” sequel. “It’s lovely to be asked, and the following that film has is the best you can hope for as a filmmaker, but ‘Shaun’ is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it’s a story that to add it it — like ‘Alien 3′ did to Aliens’ — might end up detracting from the original,” he says. “So certainly when Edgar and I make our next film, we’re gonna really disappoint everybody.”
For Pegg, who was once seen as the nerd-done-good, the sci-fi fan who managed to tick off practically every major sci-fi film or show going (several with the help of Abrams), he’s moved on from the sort of movies he would have gravitated towards previously.
“I spent the first part of my career kind of indulging a lot of the things I loved as a child, but ever since I became a parent, they’re just not my priority,” he says. He doesn’t read comics, isn’t “invested in any of the superhero stuff” and hasn’t even got time for Disney’s endless expansion of the Star Wars universe. “It just doesn’t interest me anymore.”
Pegg’s also in no rush to join another franchise soon.
“The great thing about ‘Mission’ is that it’s literally been a film every few years, but nowadays, if you join a franchise, you’re also going to be in someone else’s movie doing a bit part and being part of the cinematic universe,” he says.
Pegg’s filming on “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” came to end, not with a major climactic scene alongside Cruise and his fellow co-stars, followed by cheers from the crew, hugs, tears and maybe even a cake. It was, he recalls, simply a shot of Benji sitting in a car. “I think it was just me there,” he notes, “There was no huge post-stunt euphoria, or anything like that.”
But he admits he still felt emotional for saying goodbye to both the “little family of people” he’d been working intensely alongside and a franchise that has brought him so much — personally and professionally.
Pegg may not get to hang out with Cruise quite as much once the promo tour for “Dead Reckoning” finally winds down, but the sugary baked goods — coconut and gingerbread — likely won’t stop coming each Christmas. And Cruise will always be there on his phone. You won’t find him though. “I’ve got him under a secret name,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of famous people on my phone, but he’s the only one with a secret name.”
