I thought I'd do okay.

I have a lot of self-belief.

By that, I don't mean arrogance,

but I feel like you have to have the courage

of your convictions in terms of what you want to do,

you have to believe it, and I sound

like a motivational speaker.

Hi, I'm Simon Pegg, and this is the timeline of my career.

[lively jazz piano music]

- Tell us about everything.

- Well, I believe that the films

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "RoboCop"

both borrow heavily from my own life experiences.

I never thought at any point in my career

I would be speaking to Vanity Fair

about "Six Pairs of Pants."

"Six Pairs of Pants" was a sketch show.

It wasn't even on national television in the U.K.,

it was on local television, and it was a comedy sketch show.

But it's where I met Jessica Hynes

and forged a relationship which would

carry me forward to "Spaced" and beyond,

so it was a very important show in that respect.

I think you can probably find bits of it on YouTube.

I hope not.

I'd come out of university and decided to do

stand-up as a way of having some autonomy

and not having to wait for the phone to ring.

And this comedy sketch show, they put an alert out

for stand-ups to come and audition for their show,

and my agent just sent me along and I got it.

It was just an audition, you know?

So I was a stand-up, but I wanted to get back into acting,

'cause that was kinda my first love.

I always wanted to be an actor, from when I was a kid,

and my mom was sort of into community theater

and I used to go along to it with her,

and I was in a load of shows when I was a kid.

And when I was about 15, I realized that I could

quite possibly do it as a career,

even though I was from essentially,

Tatooine, in terms of the town I was in.

But I didn't really set out necessarily

to be a comedy actor.

I wasn't like, "I always wanted to be a comedy actor."

I wanted to do everything, you know.

- [Interviewer] Right.

[someone wails in background] - I think you're upset

about the house!

[Brian sighs]

- Why would I be upset about the house?

This house is the one thing I can rely on,

it's the one port in a storm.

- Yeah, Jess and I just sort of really

hit it off on "Six Pairs of Pants."

We tried to do as many sketches as we could together.

She just made me laugh so much,

and that I always find that incredibly

sort of attractive in anyone.

I love people that make me laugh,

and Jess was just an expert at that.

And when we came to do a show

on the Paramount Comedy Channel called "Asylum,"

which Edgar Wright was directing,

there was a dearth of female actors in the show.

It was mainly stand-up comics,

and stand-up, like, sadly, many areas of everywhere,

was male-dominated.

And I knew a girl, I knew a girl

from "Six Pairs of Pants" who was brilliant,

and funnier than anybody else in the room,

and we should get her.

So Jess came along to do "Asylum,"

which was directed by Edgar.

And there was a producer working on "Asylum"

who was moving over to a different network

who had the idea of Jess and I having a vehicle

written for us to be in, because we worked

really well together in "Asylum,"

'cause we'd come off the back of our chemistry

on "Six Pairs of Pants."

And Jess and I said, "Yeah, we'd love that,

"but can we write it?"

And so we wrote "Spaced," and we asked if Edgar

could direct it because we'd loved working with him

on "Asylum," and that was how that little trio came about.

I look back on that time and think,

"Man, we were so lucky."

We were that sort of naive and sure of ourselves,

And the people around us as well, the personnel

were all fairly young and they were sort of making roads

into network TV, and Jess and I just went,

"Yeah, okay, but we want to write it."

That was our stipulation, like we had

any kind of wiggle room to negotiate.

but they were like, "Sure, okay."

And along the whole way, for a long time,

it was just like, "Sure, yeah, okay, yeah."

We were enabled.

I'd stepped into this world thinking,

"Hey, everything just gets handed to you.

"This is great."

It's not the case.

And I don't think "Spaced" would get made now.

It would be experimented on, on a deep network,

a digital satellite network somewhere,

before we even saw the light of the mainstream.

We just wanted to make something that really spoke to us,

but none of the programs leveled at 20-somethings

at the time really spoke to us in any way

on a personal level.

They were all very aspirational

and they were full of beautiful people.

As much as we loved "Friends,"

we wanted to make the anti-"Friends"

and have it be about what unemployed loser dropouts do.

And people seemed to respond to it, which was lovely.

Oh my God!

[zombie gasps]

She's so drunk!

[chuckles]

I wrote a scene in "Spaced" where Tim is playing

Resident Evil under the influence of amphetamines

and starts to live out the game,

which was just an excuse, really, to shoot a sequence

where I was jumping around killing zombies.

I think it was one of the first things that we shot.

Edgar really wanted to sort of lay out his stall

and show what kind of show we were making to the producers.

And we shot the sequence and we edited it together

and showed it and said this is the kind of thing

we were gonna do.

And I never forget the degree of pride

that I felt when "Spaced" aired,

just after "Friends" finished on Friday night at 9:30,

within minutes of "Friends" finishing,

of their being a sort of lovefest on the couch

at Central Perk, I blew off a zombie's head

on television and felt such a joy, a swell of pride.

And after shooting that sequence, Edgar and I

were like, "Oh, it'd be great if we could make

"a zombie film, wouldn't it?

"Our own zombie film.

"It could be about just us, you know,

"like what would happen if it happened to us?"

[laughs] And then that's how it was born.

It's a wonderful thing when you step

onto a film set of something you have written,

because you see your own imagination writ large,

you see your own imagination realized in places

and situations, and that's really, really amazing.

And so, to suddenly find ourselves

in the Winchester set, or walking around Crouch End

when it's literally teeming with zombies,

was an amazing thing, and it still is.

I didn't really think of where it was gonna be shown

or if it would get shown or whether it would

ever see the light of day in any other country

other than the U.K.

It was just, we were in the moment,

we're making our movie and not hobbled

by [laughs] the burden of expectation.

It was kind of, "Let's just get this on DVD

and then we can give it to our moms and that'll be fun."

And then it came out in the U.K., and it was well received,

and then it started to get attention in the U.S.,

and George Romero saw it and a lot

of our favorite directors saw it,

and there was a little campaign to get

it a theatrical release, which it did.

And then we went out on tour, on a six-week tour

of the U.S., me and Edgar and Nick.

It was like being in a band.

It was amazing.

It was more like being in a band when we went back

with "Hot Fuzz," 'cause people had liked our first album,

so then we felt like little indie rock stars.

Yeah, it was extraordinary.

I look back on it now and just think,

I'm glad I was that naive in a way.

Oh, no, no, I'm serious.

I've just come out of a relationship.

[Shaun yelps]

- Benji, what do you got?

- Well, these hard drive platters are just fried.

They just made a mess of them.

There's just holes in them and stuff,

and it's got scorched all the way through.

And then there's, look, this one's got

a hole in it and stuff.

I don't believe it, I can't even look at it.

Edgar and I were writing "Hot Fuzz,"

and the phone rang upstairs and we put the call through,

"Oh, J.J. Abrams is on the phone."

I said, "What, the 'Alias' man?"

We had a chat and he'd said he'd liked "Shaun of the Dead,"

and he'd seen me and Edgar at the Saturn Awards,

but he said he [laughs] didn't have the guts

to come and say hello, which is hilarious to me

because J.J.'s the most gregarious, ebullient human being

you could ever meet.

But he said, "Do you wanna come and do

a bit of 'Mission: Impossible III'?"

And I said, "Yeah, all right, why not?"

And that was that.

It was a really odd.

And he said, "I'm gonna send you, I've got this new show."

[laughs] This is great.

"So I've just done this new show for ABC.

"I'll send it to you."

And he sent me the whole of the first season

of "Lost" on individual DVDs,

I got this big box, and I binged the whole show

before it had even shown in the U.S.

And I just thought, "Oh, this is amazing."

Because I'd seen episodes of "Alias,"

but I wasn't a regular viewer of the show.

But that was it. I was, "Oh, this guy's brilliant.

"I'll do this."

So I went over and did my little cameo

playing Tom Cruise's GPS.

And it was just that period of time

was a particularly rough patch,

And I found myself in L.A. and I didn't really know L.A.

I was in some hotel in Beverly Hills,

and I couldn't quite understand

how I couldn't walk anywhere.

I'd step out and I'd look up these long boulevards

like, "Where the hell is the shops [laughs] and stuff?

"What is this place?"

"This is bizarre."

So I wound up just stuck in this hotel room

for eight days waiting to be called,

as these big movies, sometimes,

the way they move, it's unpredictable,

and [inhales sharply] I was just sorta slowly going insane.

And I eventually got to set and I did my bit,

but I was totally wired and very jet-lagged,

and it was all very surreal.

It was very strange to be occupying a space

that I had kind of always dreamed of,

making a movie in Hollywood with one

of the biggest stars in the world,

probably the biggest star in the world,

and not to be enjoying it particularly.

But that all turned around with the next one, thankfully.