THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.83 - SIMON PEGG

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Adam talks with British actor, comedian and action figure Simon Pegg about booze, drugs, teen romance, David Bowie, Tom Cruise, Star Trek circularity, Star Wars trolls, Big Train and other random whiffle.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production supportMusic and jingles by Adam Buxton (except ‘Star Trek’ theme composed by Alexander Courage)RELATED LINKSBIG TRAIN - WANKING IN THE OFFICEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ufaDIdq37oBIG TRAIN - SHOWJUMPERS AND FIREFIGHTERShttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCPhkxskRVsBIG TRAIN - HALL AND OATES (Bad technical quality!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh5f-_I1df4HOT FUZZ - TIM MESSENGER DEATHhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BavTQmiA9mc‘SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ’ TRAILERhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Dvh7OfMaMBOWIE & ‘KIRLIAN’ PHOTOGRAPHYhttps://boingboing.net/2017/10/26/the-time-david-bowie-photograp.htmlBOWIE TALKS ABOUT COCAINE CAUSING ‘SWISS CHEESE BRAIN’https://welcomebackbowie.wordpress.com/articles/david-bowie-interview-in-arena-springsummer-1993/GOING CLEAR (SCIENTOLOGY DOC) TRAILERhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixgd38EZIR0BRAIN PICKINGS - AGAINST SELF CRITICISMhttps://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/23/against-self-criticism-adam-phillips-unforbidden-pleasures/BRAIN PICKINGS - JAMES BALDWIN & MARGARET MEAD DISCUSS FORGIVENESS, GUILT AND RESPONSIBILITYhttps://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/19/a-rap-on-race-margaret-mead-and-james-baldwin/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here.

Yeah. Guess where I am? That's right. Halfway up a mountain in Peru with Bear Grylls. And some hipster drug smugglers. No, I'm not. I'm in East Anglia. I got my routine. I'm sticking to it as long as I can. I'm out here with Rosie. Hey, Rose. Give us a hug. I love you, dog. Telling Rose I love her in her own voice must be confusing for her. As I speak, it's a blustery evening, but the sun is going down and I'm looking out over a field that was harvested a while back

and is now covered with stubble, little short straw stumps. And the spider community have woven threads between the tops of every stump and now that the sun is low on the horizon it's all backlit so it looks like you're very very high above thousands of tiny little golden rope bridges stretched between a forest of very straight trees. It's quite a spectacular sight. Shut up, Buckles. Tell us about the podcast. All right. Podcast number 83 features a conversational ramble with British actor, writer, comedian and action figure Simon Pegg. I got to know Simon at the end of the 90s, after seeing him in TV shows like I'm Alan Partridge, Brass Eye,

and of course the sitcom Spaced, directed by Edgar Wright, featuring co-writer Jessica Hines and Nick Frost and Mark Heap and so many other great, great people. And I would bump into all that lot at social events in London now and then during the early 2000s. And it was always good to see them and then in 2006 Edgar cast me as annoying local reporter Tim Messenger in Hot Fuzz which he had co-written with Simon and I enjoyed a very happy couple of weeks with Simon and the rest of the cast on location in Wells where my character was superbly and gorily dispatched by a falling church spire. By the time Hot Fuzz came out in 2007, Simon had also appeared in Mission Impossible 3 alongside Tom Cruise,

and he was off on a path that has seen him continue to work with Edgar and Nick Frost, as well as, as far as I can tell, pretty much all of his childhood heroes on projects like Steven Spielberg's Tintin and Ready Player One, more impossible missions with the cruiser, and various jaunts into the universes of Star Wars and Star Trek, all of which we talked about in this conversation, which incidentally was recorded in October of this year, 2018, at Simon's house out in the country north of London, where he lives with his wife Maureen and his daughter Tilly. and embarked on a highly enjoyable catching up session, swapping notes about booze, drugs and childhood romance before getting to grips with important nerd business. We also compared notes on parenthood,

specifically our efforts to culturally indoctrinate our children, which led us on to talking more about one of my favourite ever TV sketch shows, Big Train, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, which Simon was in, of course, alongside people like Amelia Bulmore and Kevin Eldon, Julia Davis, Catherine Tate, Mark Heap, and many more. We chatted a little bit about those days. I've put a couple of links to the sketches, the big train sketches that we mentioned in the description of this podcast,

along with some other related bits and pieces, including a trailer for Slaughterhouse Rules, a horror comedy, which Simon appears in with Nick Frost. That's just been released as I speak, but we failed to talk about it. We were just too busy with important catching up business. I'll be back at the end for a brief recommendation and a goodbye, but right now,

here we go! We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Yes, yes, yes. So hey man, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you? Oh, I'm alright, yeah, not too bad. I can't believe it's that long since I've seen you. It's a long time, we were trying to figure out like when we last saw each other and i think it may have been just shortly after hot fuzz so it's incredible over 10

years ago i don't feel like it's that long no because i see you i see you in lat films and stuff i know and i hear your voice a lot yeah and we watch it because tilly loves uh party pom-pom oh okay and also knows you because of things that you know because i've shown her clips on youtube also she saw her fuzz and it's like a weird elevated social media that you feel like you're in touch with people but you're not when you see them on the tv and that's right and also you and i both live uh in the countryside yes and as we were saying before we don't really get out much, don't go to too many parties. I certainly don't.

Oh my goodness. And that is one of the very few lessons I've learned as a kind of grown up man. Yeah. Is that actually you don't really need to go to most parties. No, and I don't sort of, because I don't drink anymore and I'm married, the primary reasons for going out have been removed.

I don't want to get drunk and I don't want to meet anybody. So why bother? I find myself doing that. If we go out to something like, if me and Maureen go out to like, you know, a thing and then there's a party afterwards, I just want to leave immediately.

I don't want to stay. And it would be okay if there were lots of other people there who weren't interested in those things. But that's the thing is that most people are on one of those missions. And then you get to that point in the evening that most people are on yeah one of those missions and then you get to that point in the evening when the people around you you lose everybody like they start to change and and you and it dawns on you that everybody sort of becomes an arsehole at about 10 o'clock and you wonder why you didn't notice before and it was because you were one as

well yeah you were the biggest one and you just was particularly. But it's an odd feeling of suddenly like, even with Mo, like we'd go out and, because she is less averse to going out than I am. So if we go out, she makes the most of it. She barely drinks. And if we do go out, she'll have a glass of wine or something. And even with her, it's like, oh, she's gone now.

Right, okay. Do you know what I mean? You weren't a big arsehole, though, were you? I mean... Were you? Well, I was a big drinker. You're hard on yourself, though, I think. I mean Were you? Well, I was a big drinker. You were hard on yourself, though, I think. I think I was probably quite a charming drinker.

Yeah. But I wasn't a nasty drunk. I never thought of you as a massive boozer, I must say. Yeah. It was a problem, and I think I was just depressed, and the alcohol changed how I felt for a little bit, half an hour. Yeah. So then you had to drink a bit more.

Right. You know. So looking back, did you always feel that you were that way or did did it sort of become a problem at a certain point after i left college before i went to bristol university i had a summer of depression and was pretty locked away by it and so i feel like i've always kind of been susceptible to it and then and then it just crept back over time and i think there's that odd that odd thing of of life is sort of demanding that you be happy because everything seems to be working out.

But when you're not, it's confusing. And so all this stuff was happening, you know, with my career taking off. But I was fundamentally unhappy. And I think alcohol was a way of trying to remedy that. Because it doesn't work. It's not a cure. You can't self-medicate with that because it just makes you more sad. But, you know, since that, since I sorted it out.

Have you tried Bacardi breezes? I haven't. Maybe I'll give it a shot. Maybe you were just drinking the wrong stuff. Maybe I should drink more sugar with my alcohol. I'm being clear. But it's hard to pinpoint exactly why you felt that way, I suppose. But it doesn't have a reason, do you know what I mean?

It's not that you're not sad when you're depressed. You can be incredibly up when you're depressed. It's just an odd sense of being out of sorts with the world, you know. That was always in the background, all through Sean and Hot Fuzz. Hot Fuzz, I came out of it a little bit because I think I had to get into shape to play Nicholas Angel. I remember, yeah. I remember you sitting there eating your seeds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. to shape to play nicholas angel i remember yeah i remember you sitting there eating your seeds and that was a weird kind of natural sort of way of lifting myself it gave me a bit of purpose and i really enjoyed it and then but then after hot fuzz i kind of slid back down again and then and then just before mission impossible goes protocol i kind of switched it all around and now i feel great you know yeah you look very well. Thank you. Hot Fuzz was fun, though. I mean, I only did a couple of weeks on it. It was great fun. You had a spectacular death in Hot Fuzz.

It's one of the greatest. I was thinking the other day about, you know, we're that age now. We're starting to consider mortality and people are dying here and there. All over the place. Having fun, morbid thoughts. So I was thinking, like like about how i would like to die and i was thinking if if i really got it together i could actually just go back to wells and i could organize an event where maybe like someone who i fell out with in my life or something

i could say would you like to come and kill me in wells and you could push a steeple off and it would go through my head and it would be like lots of hot fuzz fans could come and they could all gather around and it would be really a kind of poetic tying up of loose ends and of course because the physics of it is so precise it would probably take about six or seven goes maybe more just to get exactly and then they'd have to have a crane just over you to drop it specifically on the top of your head that's right yeah and if it didn't quite work and I was just horribly injured. Yeah, it was like took your shoulder off. Yeah. But it would be kind of a brilliant piece of art, you know, because I keep talking to people about Bowie and I'm such a big Bowie fan.

And one of the things that was so extraordinary was the way that he seemed to orchestrate that exit and that album and tie up so many loose ends and create a few more, but it just seemed so perfect. It was so fitting, wasn't it? It was really, really amazing. I'm not sure it wasn't perfect to him. He was only 69. But to see it coming as he did, knowing how inevitable it was

and just embracing that and actually making that part of his art was just so him. Yeah, and I remember I was driving Tilly to school. Weirdly, a very odd thing happened. The weekend before he died, we showed Tilly Labyrinth. Tilly's my daughter. And she watched it and she kept asking, who's that man?

She was really interested in him. Oh, that's David Bowie. The man with the giant packet. Yeah. Who's the man who's interested in the child in an oddly weird way? Totally inappropriate way. Yeah. And we said, oh, it's David Bowie.

And he's a singer and a songwriter. And you want to hear some of his music? So we had a whole weekend of sort of doing impressions of him and stuff. Yes. Your impression of him is amazing and playing music and then on the monday he died i remember uh driving back from dropping off and of course six music was was like a dirge it was everybody was screaming and crying and i thought i'm not going to tell her because it just seems so unfair that i've you just met him and now i'm

going to tell you he died oh no she wasn't at school that's right i was out i think i've been to the gym or something i was coming back and i and i made up my mind on the way home not to tell her about david bowie and i came in and she just she was in the kitchen and she turned around david bowie's dead yeah well she must have heard it on the radio but it was such an odd coincidence that we'd had a very bowie centric weekend and it was a joy to sort of introduce and that you know like she i think starman's her favorite song same as my daughter really yeah funny and i ended up um um i end i'm gonna get all weepy if i think about it it was so intense it was yeah i ended up sort of singing that to her that night quite brilliantly i mean it was really very good did

you suspect i you suspected he was unwell right there'd been some i thought that he was because he had a heart attack in 2004 right and then he retired and you didn't see much of him and then yes rumors start circulating and i think he he certainly was unwell and he had cancer for a while i think yeah you know put two and two together after his well-publicized drug use in the 70s. Yeah. You remember those scans of his brain that he... No. That he had some sort of...

I don't know what the correct term for them is, but it's a certain type of photograph of the brain... Right. ...that revealed all these holes, really, that he'd created from taking so much coke wow hello fact-checking santa here in the 70s david bowie played around with curlian photography which was supposedly able to capture images of a person's aura but bowie didn't photograph his brain with it just the tip of his finger before and after taking cocaine. In 1993, Bowie spoke to journalist Tony Parsons about a report on CNN concerning the damage cocaine does to the human brain.

He compared the images of the cocaine brains to Swiss cheese, as there were so many holes. You'll find links to both these stories in the description of this podcast. Merry Christmas. And he was obviously shocked by it. And, you know, there were just huge gaps in his memory. Like he didn't like talking about that period partly because he just couldn't remember a lot of what he'd done. Was this a sort of Berlin kind of era? Yeah, yeah.

Mid 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When he's into all Alistair Crowley and crazy, confused bits of Nietzschean philosophy and all that stuff. And he just doesn't remember a lot of it because he was so off his face. Jesus. And so you think, God, he probably did take a few years off. But he always looked in the best of shape, though. I mean, he always...

Yes and no. His hair was perfect. Yeah, yeah. He was i never i can't get over that mugshot of him yeah which anybody would have as their 10 by 8 you know he just looks so good he does look good and you know all the punks that all used to take speed yeah that just takes years off your life yes joe strummer and people like that my God, that sort of bathtub speed, which is just horrendous. Did you ever go through that phase? Yeah.

Did you? Yeah, well, you know, in the sort of, I guess, mid to late 90s, I say phase. I think me and Nick got, like, some one weekend and had a bizarre... I remember driving back to Gloucester for my dad's 50th, having had a crazy weekend of that stuff and just crying all the way down the m4 because I just split up with my girlfriend

oh right it was a very odd time I mean it's weird when you look back at that kind of behavior and you do it when you're young because you feel so indestructible yeah and now I mean I you know I thought of it I can't get behind the mindset of why you would do anything that would essentially jeopardise your wellbeing just for a moment of feeling different, you know? I sound like an old fuddy-duddy. No, but it's what everyone goes through, isn't it? It's trying to come to terms with how you fit into the world

and maybe you feel like you don't. Yeah. And so then you certainly get into that mindset of thinking i'm just although we did it i mean like ecstasy was one of those ones that just because it was such a fun time even though there was some you know you paid for it on midweek you'd feel terrible but i remember like the late 90s when we did that episode of space and we all went clubbing we were like determined to have and we're going to show what it's really like that it's actually really good fun and you don't die,

and it's good and everyone should do it, and all the world leaders should, you know, all that crap that you think when you're that age. Considering that it might actually do you some sort of neurological damage was never even a factor, I don't think. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, you don't think too hard about consequences at that age, do you? No.

And then suddenly, within a period of just a year or two suddenly you do you think oh god that's all you can think about hello i don't know when is that is it 40 it certainly starts around there i mean i do think it's just a question of um things happening around you people getting ill or dying yeah and also having children and right you know the the mortality starts to become an issue. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah I really love talking to you so much I'm going to sort of fire a few things at you for sort of random memory blasts and you can respond or not as you see fit. I really enjoyed your book, by the way, Nerd Do Well.

Oh, thanks. Which I first picked up when it came out, which was 2009. Yeah, yeah. And all I did then was scan it for references to me or Joe. And I found a very passing reference to Joe and to us as I think you described us as like teddy teddy bearists 90s teddy bears because of our little toy movies that we used to make on the tv show but then i read it properly recently and it was really fun that's so funny and one of the things that i really was intrigued by

was your references to sex and relationships oh really guilt at your first childhood sexual fumblings yeah and quite well described like early forays into you know reaching up someone's sweater and that kind of thing which you don't think about too much like after a certain point especially when you're married i don't know why i don't know why i felt guilty after touching her boobs but you felt really guilty didn't you did and i don't know why and i think it was because it was quite um after touching her boobs um it was a friend of mine i'm still i was still in touch actually i nickname her meredith cat's anus in the uh that's right but yeah we were on icf fields but we're very young very very young and barely kind of pubic to quote alan partridge

and um and afterwards i you know because it was the first pair of you know girls boobs that doesn't sound right the first breast i touched uh and kissed actually and so it was kind of and it felt like quite a radical sex act and I think I was only about 13 and I was riding back up the hill on my grifter and there was the sign

for speed bumps and I genuinely looked at it and went oh god no what have I done yeah I think it was just because I'd taken a step into a different world. Right.

It's sort of a loss of innocence. Yeah. But then maybe it's because I was quite young, as you do. I mean, do you remember your first sort of... Yeah. I mean, not including, you know, very young kind of messing around, doctors and nurses stuff. I mean mean like when

you were doing it for the for the sake of actually yeah yeah yeah pleasure i went to a co-ed school when all that was happening you know around between about all that sex was happening yeah back in those days back in those days uh it was just amazingly fun and exciting and nice yeah and um there was a snogging competition, I remember. Oh, yeah, all that getting. I remember going to parties and, like, they would just devolve into kind of, you know, safe orgies. Yeah. Everybody was just snogging in silence.

I had the record for the longest snog at school. And we would have, it was a prep school. And on the weekends, they would do movie showings in the gym. Yeah. And that would be a big social occasion. And they'd turn the lights off and there'd be a lot of snogging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the older children.

And the end of term film one year was Hawk the Slayer. Oh. Yeah. So I snogged. That's a very horny movie. Well, I don't know because I've never seen it. I've heard it. But we started snogging, me and Alison, at the beginning of Hawk the Slayer.

I closed my eyes. I don't know if she kept hers open or not. But we snogged. There was some French kissing and it was pretty drooly. And we snogged for the length of Hawk the Slayer. So, I mean, 90 minutes or something. You could probably check that out on IMDb for an exact timing. Yeah.

And then It came on TV A few Years afterwards And it was such a strange I was like Well I wasn't watching It was on in the background

Did you get a Pavlovian Boner Pavlovian boner I don't think it was Boner time In the original Like it was pre-boners For like

So it was pure It was i mean it was also very boring we would literally just all the passion had gone out of it was purely like we're gonna keep it going we're gonna do this it's an odd kind of magnetism though i i used to go into this our school had a swimming pool and there was there were like uh there were the foyer of the of the pool and then the changing rooms were always free at lunchtime like no one was in there and i used to go in there with a girl and we just used to snog in the boys toilets and you know when you get older that kind of kissing is always a prelude to further physical activity you know you never just do it for kissing usually i mean you yeah you do like and you don't i guess

but we would just kiss all lunchtime and be quite happy with that there was no it didn't feel like it was a prelude to anything it was just kissing that's right yeah i mean it is great i do love kissing yeah it's fun yeah it's fun i mean that's one of the things that you have to um you know you can kiss your wife. And that's great. I've got to be really careful. But there is a stage in your teens and 20s maybe before things always have to be about sex or sexual intercourse or whatever, where you do, you know, you can go to a party and you can just kiss someone.

And it's really nice. Yeah, there's something to be said for just that. Yeah. And there is a point, I guess, I don't know if it's the case with everybody, but you kind of, there's a particular be said for just that yeah and there is a point i guess i don't know if it's the case with everybody but i you kind of there's a particular kind of kissing you do early on in a relationship which you know i mean i don't snog my wife in the toilets anymore you know like i did with uh alison beard but in and the kissing that you do sort of changes. This is dangerous territory. You got to be really careful.

Yeah. I liked in your book as well, the description of your sort of weird three way romance between your friend Darius. Oh, yes. Yes. Now, that's something I've always wanted to try and convert into a film or it was the it's a chapter that has no bearing on the point the point of the book was to try and kind of relate childhood to adulthood and all the things that i liked as a kid and then ended up being involved in as an adult but the the summer of 83 which is a chapter in the book is just all about this French exchange student called Muriel who came over and it was just the most heady kind of hormone busting summer of my life and I look back I fell

in love so completely with this girl and she was exotic and different and she smelt amazing and what does she smell of sausages yeah sausages and baguettes but she she just beguiled me and and i had this kind of how old were you 13 right and i had this sort of you know this there was a sexual tension between us it wasn't sexual in that respect but there was a there was a romantic tension and then suddenly at this, she got off with my friend Darius. And it all came crashing in, and I was heartbroken. And I remember when I found out, I mean, I was sobbing, leaning up against a blackberry bush in Gloucester, crying my eyes out. And I stood up, and one of the blackberries had burst on my back,

and it looked like I'd been stabbed in the back. And I thought that was so symbolic of the truth. But I couldn't be mad at Darius because he hadn't been around that summer and so it wasn't like he'd kind of known what was going on and then sort of whisked her away. She wasn't mine to whisk away anyway. So he wasn't aware that it was a terrible portrayal? No, and it wasn't really, only in my mind.

And then the day she left we had a snog and it was it was such an amazing kiss and then darius kind of came over the the brow of the hill clapping like like i remember hearing his his his hands going like this and uh and then we walked off with our arm me and him walked down the hill with our arms around each other so he was it was like he was happy for you by that time he knew that yeah he knew that i had you know i i was very in love with her right and it was just i look back on it now as being hazy you know long summer nights and like you do when you think you think of your childhood in a very romantic way and it's always struck me as a great coming of age story just yeah just uh did you ever see each other again then she came

back the next year and then and it but it wasn't quite the same we were a bit older and and it was a rainier summer and it just didn't feel like it did it was a lightning in a bottle i remember coming back from a party one night with her in the car and she sort of fell asleep on my shoulder and she sort of put her arm around me and you know she's just been affectionate it wasn't i i to me my whole body was just like humming my heart was thumping and i could feel her her head on my shoulder i could smell her sort of like impulse whatever she was wearing her cheap teenage perfume and i could feel her little spiky gelled hair digging into my cheek and and i just wanted to stay i wanted that journey to continue forever you know know. It was so amazing.

And then she went back to France. And we stayed in contact for a long time. We lettered. You remember letters? Yes, I think so. Yes. How are you? I am fine.

That's it, yeah. In her little kind of girlish script that had love hearts over the eyes and stuff. Yeah. And we did stay pen pals for a while i really related to the intensity of your little romantic flings at that point yeah i used to really fall in love or what i thought was falling in love all the time yeah yeah and then be absolutely heartbroken like i couldn't i just couldn't imagine how life would continue when they fell apart. Because unfortunately for me, it ended up being something that took a while to straighten out.

You know what I mean? Right through my 20s, I was getting into relationships where I was immediately like totally in love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, it was very claustrophobic for the other person. Absolutely. I remember going out with a girl when I was 16 and saying, I love you, I love you, and wanting her to say it back, but she wouldn't. And I realized why,

it's because she was emotionally far more mature than I was. But I think when you start to experience that kind of feeling when you're a kid, you just want to experience it all the time because it's so new. And when you start to find other people attractive, it's just so much fun you know and then you have relationships that last six weeks and then you go and then you have a break and then you go on to another one and each one is as intense as the last and what do you think it is like i often wonder like what is it about me that wanted that or needed that was it as simple as

just feeling that you were in some kind of dramatic movie-like situation that these feelings were so intense and so fun for that reason? Or is it some sort of insecurity? I don't know, because it has nothing to do with sex at that point, really. It's not like, I mean, when you get to like 15, 16, it does. But even that is a sort of fumbling. It's not like, I want this now. This is what I want now. You move on to it inevitably because you kind of,

you progress to the next stage of your physical relationship. But when you're like 13 or so, it's just, it's far more romantic. It's far more grand and sort of, you know, novelistic. Yeah. I feel like I enjoyed the pain of it as well. I feel like there's something, I remember when I fell in love with this girl at college

called Caroline Kaz, and she was a goth, and she was splendid. She was just like... She had hair extensions, and she smelled like patchouli oil, and she was everything I found attractive in a woman at the time as a fellow goth. I remember we stayed up all night and watched the Sisters of Mercy on VHS, their last concert at the Albert Hall. Wow. It was called Wake. You were a goth. I remember we stayed up all night and watched the Sisters of Mercy on VHS,

their last concert at the Albert Hall. Wow. It was called Wake. You were a goth. And we lay on the sofa together. And I went back to Gloucester the next day because I was at college in Stratford-on-Avon. Everything smelt of her.

And I put on Marianne by the Sisters of Mercy, which is this incredible dirge. It's a great song. I hear you calling Marianne. It's a brilliant song. It's very melodramatic and quite funny but to me it was just

I put it on and closed my eyes I just loved the pain of it you know because nothing had happened between us and I felt I felt like the love

I had for her was quite unrequited but I enjoyed it it was fun the drama totally the drama yeah it was a

it was a joy extremely interesting It was a joy. Extremely interesting. Apparently some kind of transposition has taken place. You weren't like a mega Star Trek fan. You liked the show. I liked Star Trek, yeah. I watched it, you know, because it was always, it's slightly older skewed, I think, Star Trek. And I started watching it when I was about seven or eight.

And I liked it because it was about seven or eight and I liked it because it was science fiction but it was much more cerebral and thoughtful than like Star Wars was just a kid's adventure you know it was fantasy but but yeah I always liked Star Trek absolutely yeah Star Trek like the original show the TV show with Shatner and Leonard Nimoy there weren't too many kind of there was a few fistfights yeah but there weren't too many slow laser battles yeah no not at all and it was always it was like six o'clock on bbc2 it would be on yeah and it was kind of creepy as well there was something slightly attractive about it because it was a bit weird but i think star wars gripped me because i was exactly the right age for it yeah seven lasers

space guns spaceship x-wing robots yeah alling. Yeah, all that. Perfect. There's definitely a motif in the book about you as this kind of outsider pop culture fan. And then suddenly you transition into being at the very core of it. Like one of the figureheads of this group of nerds, as it were. Yeah. You're like now you're in the actual movies that they're all freaking out about yeah it's very strange and there are several moments of curious circularity that you talk about in the book yeah and one of them is that star trek thing yeah that's still peculiar in a way i mean not least you know recently getting to write one getting to co-write

one which was it's like someone handing you the keys to a really, really expensive car and you really want to take it around the track, but you don't want to dent it and stuff. There's this odd responsibility that it came with, but it was really, really an amazing experience, you know, particularly once we started shooting because the writing process prior to that was very pressurized. We didn't have much time. They'd had the script, they threw it out and they just gave us a blank page and they'd already were kind of in pre-production so it was a really stressful time and trying to figure out what justin the director wanted because he wasn't he wasn't a very verbal communicator he had he's a brilliant brilliant director and a lovely guy but at first i was like what the fuck does this guy want you know i couldn't figure it out yeah but eventually we had enough of a script to start shooting and then once we were shooting doug jung and i who was the other writer we'd

every night we'd write the next day's work finesse it and then go in and it was great fun i just love the idea of you as a as a kid watching this show and being intrigued by the character of spock and then fast forward a few years and you're opposite spock yeah and it is actually leonard nimoy yeah that's weird that was very odd and the experience of acting with a character that you know not an actor i mean i've had that lots of times and i've acted with an actor i've seen many times and enjoyed but when you're actually talking to a character that you've you known for your life like when I had to say things to Spock in the first Star Trek movie,

when Leonard Nimoy was in full Spock mode, being Spock, and had to interact, not with Leonard Nimoy, but with Spock, that was very odd. And during those nights, we were shooting at the,

there was a Budweiser factory in LA, in the valley, and that was that big ice set. Yeah, all the interior of the engine room was there as well, because I think J.J. Abrams wanted it to look like the Titanic, so it was all this kind of valves and tanks and pipes and stuff. Me and Chris Pine and Leonard were sharing a trailer, because it was close to the set, and sitting in there,

and Leonard fell asleep, and Chris and I were just sort of looking at each other and Spock was just sat in an armchair snoring it was so strange so so surreal so he licked his ears just nibbled the top of the points and then you get used to it and then and then suddenly it becomes quite ordinary and uh and I always try and maintain a sense of wonder and stay in touch with young me so it never gets boring you know yeah i don't think it ever will but and you had another moment like that with carrie fisher yeah you were with short of the dead at comic-con yeah and then i had another what i had a moment with her at comic-con when i literally lined up like a fan to meet her you know because she'd been

my she was my first crush i guess the first public figure that I felt romantic love for, you know, or character. And I was very young. So I met her and told her that I'd kissed her picture when I was a kid for bedtime. And then when I was on the set of The Force Awakens as an actor, you know, and then by that time we'd kind of had a passing relationship on Twitter and met.

And we walked around the set of The Resistance Base together, like arm in arm. Then we stopped and we were talking and set of the Resistance Base together, like arm in arm. Then we stopped and we were talking and I was looking into her eyes and they were the same eyes, obviously, that had utterly enchanted me as a kid. And it was such a bizarre feeling for them to be looking back at me and talking to me. And I said to her,

you know I've always been in love with you, don't you? And she grabbed my hand and looked at my wedding ring and said, fuck you! And walked off and uh it was just magical yeah it really really was magical and i i she seems like quite an amazing person yeah she was extraordinary and i i said to her at the time i said because she had quite a tough day her first day on set i was around at that time and i said it's because this film this story has been in your life since you were 19 and it has affected your life in so many ways for better and for worse you know in the best and worst ways for her and i guess mark hamill you know harrison ford didn't seem that bothered you know he was very very cool about it but i think for mark and

carrie and i think also because harrison ford had a huge career away it but i think for mark and carrie and i think also because harrison ford had a huge career away from star wars but for mark and carrie you know they were sort of defined by you know yeah i heard you talking somewhere about the strange journey that that franchise has been on and where we've ended up with a weird sort of cadre of toxic fanboy people who are almost like the alt-righters. Yes. You know what I mean? And they just go after the people who are now working on the new Star Wars movies if they don't like the female characters or if they think it's too PC or whatever

and they're kind of all furious because they just go, look at this new character. He's called Bingo Bonjo. That's not a real Star Wars character. That's just made up. It's fake, fake. It's almost like they're using that Trump language of fake news, that sort of thing.

It's just fake. And they can't see, they don't seem to have any perspective on how crazy it is. But it's weird. I feel, and I said, I think I spoke about it recently, because I spoke about feeling guilty about going on and on about the Jar Jar Binks character in the prequels, because the actor who played Jar Jar Binks, he took it really hard.

Not me personally, but all of the kind of, you know. That level of cynicism. Yeah, he had depression about it. And I felt bad because obviously you feel like you're insulting a you know a kind of robbery guy with big ears yeah you don't think about the person what did you call him around like he was like a sort of camp jamaican rabbit character it feels like that's what you're complaining about not a human being who's who's you know doing a character yeah but and i was very responsible at the time because when spaced came out that was about the same time as the phantom menace came but and i was very responsible at the time because when spaced

came out that was about the same time as the phantom menace came out and i used space as my platform for my dismay at that film and then recently when i was sort of saying about for fuck's sake it's just a film because they bullied one of the actors from the last film who played the part of rose and they bullied her off social media and when I was sort of saying oh for fuck's sake it's just a film I think a lot of people were like well how that you're a hypocrite you know because I'd complained so bitterly about the prequels and I did really but it was clear that it wasn't you know it's just that's what nerdy friends do they sort of bitch about these things but you don't then translate that into real life enmity and... Absolutely. And the weird thing was,

is that there was an odd thing with the last film, The Last Jedi, in that the people that didn't like it were sort of being gaslighted by the people that did like it, who were just dismissing their complaints about the film as being fanboy butthurt kind of... Right. Do you know what I mean?

And yet the whole thing is just eating itself in a hideous kind of cultural soup yeah it's a shame because it is just a film it's supposed to be fun i know i know now i remember reading a book about it at university by jean beaujolais about called america and it predicted all of this the you know our kind of infantilization and right fact that the the adult population would become obsessed with what is essentially youth cultural stuff and it would drag us away from yeah adult life because we're far less grown up than our forebears aren't we i mean you look at i look at my dad when he was nearly 50 and he was much older than me now he wasn't doing things like no we are silly boy men we are in a way and you and, we were on the vanguard.

I know, we're kind of partly responsible for it. But do you ever do any soul searching about that? Do you ever sort of think, God, I really am a silly boy man. I certainly feel like every now and again, especially with being a parent, I think I'm not fit to be a parent. I do and I don't. I do. I feel like I'm not as much. I think I'm characterized as being more of a silly boy man

than I actually am, really. And I definitely was. But I'm sort of less so now, I think. We're halfway through the podcast I think it's going really great The conversation's flowing like it would Between a geezer and his mate. All right, mate.

Hello, geezer. I'm pleased to see you. Ooh, there's so much chemistry. It's like a science lab of talking. I'm interested in what you said. Thank you. There's fun chat and there's deep chat. It's like Chris Evans is meeting Stephen Hawking.

The other moment of circularity is the whole thing of ending up working with Spielberg. Right. Because that put me in the room on the day of the story. The doodle story. The doodle story, which Joe has not finished. And I am not going to complete it for you. What? It's a Christmas tradition now, surely, each increment of that story.

I was thinking about whether i was going to ask you about it i was thinking maybe i can steal a much but then i was thinking uh cornballs is going to be so angry if i get it out of simon you know it's going to be such a moment of crushing anti-climax when eventually the punchline comes in 2022. The Christmas podcast. It was actually, Nick wasn't there. I remember, I think when Joe told the story on the podcast, he said Nick Frost was there. He wasn't.

It was just me, Edgar, and Joe, and Steven Spielberg. Oh, okay. Tom came into the room. Yeah, because he had Lord of the Rings man. Jackson. No, he wasn't there. Peter Jackson wasn't there. No, no. Peter was in New Zealand,

and he would sort of come in via satellite because he was sort of co-directing and he would be wheeled in like a head in a jar on a computer sometimes. Edgar and Joe were sort of co-writing it. For listeners who haven't heard all the Christmas episodes with Joe, this is a story that Joe sort of dangled in front of me. Or rather, he told me ages ago, and it was sort of dangled in front of me or rather he told me ages ago and it was sort of

mildly amusing about having been in the room with spielberg and tom cruise had come in and joe was doodling something on a pad and tom cruise came over and saw what he was doodling and so i just wanted him to tell the story and joe clammed up and he was like oh no i can't and i it just made me so angry i just thought oh fuck off well you know what it was is because i think joe clammed up and he was like oh no i can't and i it just made me so angry i just thought oh fuck off well you know what it was is because i think joe was trying to be discreet yeah and not sound like he was being snarky about tom yeah uh it doesn't reflect badly on no not at all not at all the story doesn't either and it was you know and i think the thing is as well is that well i'd worked with him before and he'd met edgar but you'd never met joe and he's very sort of he he's

always keen to include people that this is tom tom cruise yeah he'll like he'll zero in on the person he doesn't know just to make them feel okay because he he knows what it's like he has empathy in terms of wow tom cruise has just walked into the room he's very aware of himself in that way and so he kind of like you know was sort of including joe and talking to joe and uh and joe probably was quite grateful for that because it was quite polite. So I think telling the story of, right.

Of Tom doodling suddenly he might, he's, I think he probably panicked. Yeah. But then I'm surprised he didn't tell you off Mike. That's just mean. No, he did tell me off Mike.

Oh, okay. He did. I know, I know the story. That's the thing. And it's now it's become so, so listeners,

if you, if you haven't heard the Christmas podcast now for the last two or maybe even three years, he's been feeding me little bits of the doodle story and i know the thing is that i know that when you get to the end of it as simon says it's not gonna be it's not a great punchline it's not gonna be the best story just a moment of awkwardness it's a nice little insight i suppose exactly it presents a human side to him which most people don't see and i i kind of uh so did you did you what was it like for you did you sort of go oh this is strange when you first met him yeah i met him on set like and

i'd literally gone over to la to do a couple of scenes and i got i've been in this hotel room in beverly hills for like five days waiting to be told what to do I wasn't in a great place what year was this it's 2006 yeah and uh I was a bit stir crazy so you're like Martin Sheen in the hotel oh my god so much waiting to go exactly I was drinking heavily and I kind of was Beverly Hills is like a wilderness you walk out into the street and it's like there's no you can't walk anywhere and i had no transport i had no idea what la was like and eventually i got the call to go in and i was really really punchy and uh tom walked on set with bing rames and was like oh hey here we go actually it's this massive monologue but he was very very good and very very understanding and um and then over time obviously over the last 12 years I've got to know him a lot better.

And he's quite content for people just to speculate. I've seen like, there's been great blooper reels from the Mission films, which never end up on the DVD because I think he's quite keen to just preserve his mystique a little bit. Yeah. Because it seems to, at least for the most part, do well for him because it maintains

his sort of movie star status. And I suppose now with all the speculation about his involvement with Scientology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. at least for the most part, do well for him because it maintains his sort of movie star status. And I suppose now, with all the speculation about his involvement with Scientology, there's no point in trying to firefight. Absolutely. Because if he starts, I mean, the questions will never stop. I know. Although I remember Chris McQuarrie saying

that the first time Bryan Singer met on Valkyrie, Tom had said to him, you can ask me anything you want, you know, and Brian had fired off a load of inappropriate questions at him, which he answered. I've never spoken about it with him, you know. I'm kind of intrigued. I think I probably could ask him,

but I don't want to sound like I'm taking advantage of my privileged access to him, you know, because we work together and then it's like, oh, great, I'm in a position to get to the bottom of this stuff. Also, it would kind of remind that person that that's what you're thinking about. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sort of want to get beyond that.

And it's not always, you know, because the person that you see every day isn't the kind of person you see in the pages of the slag mags, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's just the guy you work with, albeit him. Yeah. Did you ever watch Going Clear? I didn't. And you know why I didn't? Because I didn't. You didn't want to. I didn't want to sort of like. Even think about it. Yeah. Did you ever watch Going Clear? I didn't. And you know why I didn't? Because I didn't want to even think about it.

Yeah, that's terrible, isn't it? Now I know what you mean. I put my head in the sand a little bit, I think. It is intriguing. It's funny in LA because there's like a Scientology channel now and stuff. Right, yeah. And there's buildings all around LA for it. But then I'm an atheist, so all religion seems a bit nuts to me

whether it's a new religion or an old religion, all dogma is gobbledygook yeah, I mean I think the least interesting aspect of Scientology is the so called religious aspect of it and all the thetans and the aliens

and all that, no most of them as far as I can tell you know scientology is a set of systems and it's almost like a business ideology yeah i think it's more of a business and i think people are worried about just the way they conduct business and the way they harass certain people who don't agree with them or whatever yeah that all seems very... Yeah. So... But it is weird. I've met a few Scientologists. Like, I met Beck years ago.

Yeah, but he was born one, right? He's like his parents. Was he? Yeah, maybe. Yeah. And I was so keen to ask him, but obviously I don't know him at all. All I could think was,

I really like your music. Yeah. You're great. So you don't really want to... Well, that's the thing with Tom, is that he's very charismatic and utterly lovely you know really really sort of generous and um personable and it's hard to equate that also you never know what level of i don't mean literally like theta level or whatever but you don't know how immersed they are in that maybe they're you know it's like

you meet some christians and they kind of that. Maybe they're, you know, it's like you meet some Christians and they kind of cherry pick what aspects of Christianity they want to apply to their lives. They're like, yeah, I'm on board with that bit, but not so much that bit. I don't see why it should be any different with Scientology per se. Man, I watched the last Mission Impossible film the other day. Holy shit, it was so fun.

It is fun, isn't it? I mean, they're really fun films. It's like those the born films and the mission impossible films as far as i'm concerned yeah are some of the most enjoyable bits of escapist fun well i think at the cinema they're so solid yeah and and there's something to be said for his um tom's insistence on doing everything practically and really so like when he's running across the rooftops there doing his that was nine weeks after he broke his ankle that that bit when he's running across the top of the bridge i mean he smashed his ankle they said he wouldn't walk

for three months and and uh and wouldn't possibly have a sprint again they said and like within nine weeks he was back on it um but yeah and i what my theory is when we did the the fourth one when he hung off the the burj in dubai and brad bird who directed that shot that so beautifully that the audience when when you're with an audience watching that movie you'd sense the vertigo they'd experience when the shot kind of is a big imax shot and it drifted out of the window looking down ethan hunt's looking down and there was a physical reaction in the audience that felt really authentic and kind of oh that's like being on a ride or something they're actually having a physical reaction to it and i think it came from the idea that if the audience are aware that something is real and not

cg or vfx you know we had days on set when there was a quiet sort of dread because we knew things were going to happen that were very, very dangerous. But he does it all. And when you watch it, he did 106 parachute jumps from 26,000 feet to get those three minutes of footage for that movie. And it took three weeks. But when you're watching it and you know that it's actually happening, there is a degree of tension you just don't get from artificiality.

Yeah. And that's what's really sort of powered these movies in the last sort of three, I think. And, of course, one of the people who really went to town with what you could do with CG and created hugely overcomplicated sort of tableau scenes was George Lucas when he started doing the remakes have you ever bumped into george lucas i have i met him at the um the premiere of the revenge of the sith

which is the third prequel yeah and i was still going back each time even though i'd been disappointed with the previous two i think i was slightly less disappointed with the third one but i met him at the premiere and um and I sort of went to say hello to him and he turned around and I saw the weariness in his eyes like oh here's another 30 something fanboy he's going to tell me how much I changed his life and he was talking to Ron Howard and I think Ron Howard had seen Shaun of the Dead because he immediately went oh hey Shaun of the Dead shook my hand and George Lucas immediately changed his demeanor because it's like okay he's involved

in filmmaking and was actually quite sort of candid with me and um i don't think he knew i was such an avid decrier of his last three films but he said i'll give you some advice don't be making the same film that you made 30 years ago 30 years from now or something and um it was an interesting point and i must admit watching the last star wars film the overriding feeling i got when i came out was i missed george lucas for all the complaining that i'd done about him in the prequels there was something amazing about his imagination and i think he's a real first adopter he saw cg as this way of realizing his own imagination not realizing that it might actually end up looking a bit,

you know, flat and empty. That was not his intention. And I don't think he was being lazy by using too much CG. He just wanted to... No, no, it was a desire just to fill every single inch with something that had been thought about. He just was... There was too much love.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also back in the day when he was making the first films there was a gary kurtz and alan ladd jr there were these producers that were there to kind of rein in his incredible sort of miasmic imagination which could very easily overflow into confusion and i think there were people there just keeping it nice and restrained and and those first three films were the product of real collaboration and then with the prequels it was like do what you want and without someone to steer him in the right direction it did overflow into sort of slightly muddled kind of less elegance and um but i do

feel like his voice is missing from the current ones. Controversial. I've got a present for you, by the way. Oh, man. Let me go and get it. You've got it. I know you've got it, but it's vinyl, so it's something that you can always keep. Okay.

That's a picture of the wolf. Oh, I don't have that on vinyl. Wow. I thought you would like... Hey, thanks man. Not at all. That's great. Look at that picture of him as well. I know, isn't he beautiful?

Prokofiev, yes, he narrates this. All is quiet, all is quiet. Except the little birds oh that's really thoughtful thanks man no no it's all that's so kind of you vinyl seems to be having this huge resurgence as well yeah my son's well into it really although he just mainly listens to footwork chicago footwork do you know what that is no it's a sort of a kind of jungle hybrid what i don't even know i haven't even heard of that yeah it's got it's got sort of a kind of jungle hybrid. What? I don't even know. I haven't even heard of that. It's got sort of TV and film samples in it and stuff,

and it's quite minimal. Have you sort of enjoyed educating your children when it comes to music? Yeah. Well, I only got so much joy because at a certain point they find their own enthusiasms and off they go. But yeah yeah there was one period where my eldest son did actually start going through all my cds and picking stuff out and

i was handing him stuff and saying check this out yeah yeah this is you know magazine you'll like there yeah and uh here's some pavement they're pretty good uh this is a good one to start with you try and do it without being too like you don't want to prescribe yeah exactly like you're being you're telling them what to do with tilly in the school run in the morning like i'll put a track on and she'll put a track on and it's great when she likes something you know i played her once in a lifetime by talking heads and she's like this is really good you just feel so proud and so yeah and so being in the car with tilly and starting to kind of you know give her music felt like a sort of legacy thing you know and for her like the other day we

were driving and she went oh can i listen to hands of love i was like yeah you can yeah i felt so proud oh it's great has she seen a lot of stuff that you've been in does she like comedy stuff she does she's funny about stuff though like she's not particularly she gets what i do for a living and you know she's been on every film set and and she's met everybody and and i think because it's been commonplace for her since she was small she's not that impressed by it like she's seen hot fuzz and i as i mentioned to you earlier she saw it because she'd seen your death and i thought well that's the worst so she saw it on youtube or whatever yeah yeah her friend said look at this it's Adam Buxton dying by by the head you hate Adam Buxton right well you're gonna love this hi hi and then so we watched up first we watched the world's end

because it's fairly bloodless I haven't shown a Shaun of the Dead just because it's a little gory my son loved spaced oh really yeah so I showed him that at a certain point. And he really, he demolished that. My daughter hasn't seen those yet. I think you need to get some of the references, I think. So I'm going to wait a little bit. I suppose, yeah. I suppose that's important to get the full experience.

Yeah. Have you shown them Adam and Joe? The boys, yeah, they've seen some of it. But she hasn't seen, my daughter who's it but she hasn't seen my daughter who's 10 she hasn't seen any of it yet yeah uh it's a bit of a weird one that needs a lot of cherry picking there's quite a lot of dross in there also they're very sweary like the toy movies was just really we were so silly and just swore all the time because that's what you do when you and that was when we were that was at the very beginning of kind of being allowed to swear on TV

as much as we are today. When we were on Spaced, we were allowed one fucking episode in the first series and two in the second. And that was like a big deal. And I remember them saying, well, you can have three shits. If you can have a fuck,

you've got to take out three shits. That's the rule in our heads. It was like a kind of a point system. and now you just watch you know anything ever since kitchen nightmares i mean this is gordon ramsay right it's it's been devalued yeah you can say shit i think anytime you want now yeah oh yeah absolutely breakfast tv whatever it's not a problem my daughter is obsessed by Ready Player One. Oh, really? Yeah. She's read the book.

Yeah. Ten times. Wow. She listens to the audio book every night. That's so funny because it's not about her era, is it? No. It's written by a guy who grew up with all the stuff he mentions. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's got a good, strong female protagonist. Yes, Artemis. Yeah, and she loves mythology and stuff. stuff he mentions yeah yeah i think it's got a good strong female protagonist yes artemis yeah and she loves mythology and stuff she just loved the fact that she was called artemis i think yeah yeah yeah she obviously saw the film when it came out and loved it absolutely loved it you played ogden morrow that's right yeah who is the kind of steve wozni to... Yeah, it's as if in the Apple universe, as if Wozniak had been the face of Apple and not Steve Jobs. Do you know what I mean? So Ogden Morrow was the slightly more socially adept one

who was able to kind of take it to the masses and do the presentations. And Mark Rylance's character, James Halliday, was the awkward sort of tech wizard. Yeah. But yeah, that was really, really good fun doing that. It would have been odd because I'd got the book. I'd been given the book when it came out because they mentioned Spaced in the book. sort of tech wizard yeah but yeah that was really really good fun doing that it would be not because i've got the book i've been given the book when it came out because they mentioned spaced in the

book there's a moment when he says m and h have an evening watching spaced which is a nice sort of nod and then so when the film came around and i got the call to do it it felt like another one of those moments of like oh you have to do this you know and also because it's steven spielberg have you watched that big spielberg documentary that's good isn't it yeah it's amazing and i've had a great time again in the same way with the we were talking about music i've done the same thing with films with tilly is is sit and take her through all the kind of films that she wouldn't see if she didn't have a movie fan as a dad which of course meant a lot of those amblin movies and the stuff that spielberg produced and also not just you know

E.T. and the films he directed but she became very obsessed with Jaws like she really wanted to see Jaws yeah and I couldn't allow that because she was only seven but she kept going on about it so and I happened to be shooting the movie at the time so I said come to work and you can ask Mr Spielberg and if he says you can watch it then I'll stand by that and so she did and he said no and she took it she was like okay fair enough but then the minute she turned eight she was like can i watch it now did he say how old he thought he did he said she should be 12 right and he asked her her age and the other night because she's nine now i said should we watch it and she was like no so she's a bit nervous about it it's funny how it resonates through the generations it's still

this benchmark for um okay am i old enough to watch something scary and it's not exactly it's not particularly gory either there's a couple of moments in there but it's purely the tension and the scene setting that he does so well you know the kind of the awful promise of violence which is just goes throughout that movie yeah yeah i'm excited though to show them uh big train oh yeah yeah yeah and you wrote for that didn't you wrote hall and oats didn't you oh yeah that's right yeah joe yeah yeah i mean wrote it we sketched out an idea for graham and arthur i think the idea alone of hall and oats helping out on a council estate yeah that was joe's and then the one i had was uh wanking in the office oh my god that's like

everybody's favorite for people who haven't seen the sketch oh yes the premise is someone sort of saying look guys i really think that we should cut out the wanking in the office because it's becoming really a problem yeah it's essentially a debate about not being able to smoke in the office but it's wanking yeah you know what i have a massive regret about that sketch because mark heap says i think if you did a poll in the building, there would be, you know, and I should have said, I wish I could do my poll in the building. And it's one of my biggest regrets that I'd never got to, I'd never picked up on that feed line because it was such a fun, and it was just about smoking, you know. Yeah. yeah uh but then kevin came up with the you know he sprang the two bits of paper stuck together on us and stuff and uh and it ends with some guy behind a rubber plant just feverishly beating

himself and mark saying did you not hear a word i said so many wonderful things in that show oh my god the fireman as well oh yeah yeah the show jumpers who want to be firemen the show jumpers who want to be firemen and they're like children and they're sort of going and admiring and the first show jumper sketch was in the the pilot that was directed by chris morris yeah with prince right the um oh no that was jockeys jockeys yeah yeah and like wild jockeys yeah there was a sense on that that was 98 we shot that 20 years ago jesus christ it was 20 years ago that it came out i think and the excitement of being involved in that show big train was so much like this is what i want to see you know this felt like we were because i've been a big fan of the day-to-day as i'm sure you

were yeah and of course working with chris and meeting steve coogan around that time as well it felt like wow we're with that group of comedians now we're involved in that movement that you know i've been such a fan of and yeah shooting those scenes it was just so so exciting less so with the second series because it felt like it was a little after the fact i think yeah also graham wasn't writing for it at that point and also graham directed the first season oh yeah and and he his direction it's very important with comedy i think to have somebody funny behind the camera as well. Yeah, yeah. And, of course, Graham's comedic sensibility permeated his directorial choices in it and it added so much more to it,

whereas we didn't have someone who was overtly comic directing the second series. Right. I remember that because me and Joe had put forward some ideas for it. I think we ended up seeing the pilot. Or maybe we saw the pilot and then contributed ideas for it. I think we ended up seeing the pilot or maybe we saw the pilot and then contributed ideas for the series. Either way, we saw this pilot before it had been out and it was so exciting.

Yeah. It was very exciting that Graham had contacted us anyway, because, um, we'd just done our, the Adam and Joe show and nothing else. And we, you know,

there was no social media. There was no, we didn't have any sense of whether anyone was watching it or not and then we got this email out of the blue from graham saying oh i really like your show we're like holy shit yeah and then we saw this pilot directed by chris morris and you know like you we loved all this yeah yeah and i remember you doing that sketch where you're down an alley maybe it was even the the first sketch and it's um a standoff between this armed robber oh yeah yeah and a load of policemen don't fire the gun don't fire the gun you're like what and you keep on shooting the gun yeah i was really nervous

doing that mainly because of chris because chris was so enigmatic or it seemed he's actually lovely but you you know meeting him was very nerve-wracking yeah and i remember him directing me during that sketch and i didn't feel like i was getting it right and it was uh it was a bit arduous i was thinking the other day when you're gonna come over i suddenly remembered a thing that you did and i think it must have been around about the same time maybe a bit like late 90s definitely but you you took an episode of the priory do you remember that show with zoe ball and jamie theiston and you did a commentary on it and this is even as ken called it and it was because we had it on vhs at our place me and nick frost and smiley yeah we had a copy and so it was like a dvd commentary it wasn't even on a dvd it was before you could

put things on dvd but it was such a funny idea. Yes, it was at the height of DVD commentaries. And I used to watch all the commentary. Yeah, me and Egg used to go to New York to buy DVDs that had commentaries on them. Whoa, yeah. I mean, I wasted a fuck of a lot of time just listening to commentaries for really dogshit films. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With people talking about, oh, well, this film, what I did was,

it's like, who cares? I know. But the ones for me were the ridley scott ones which were really like a master class yeah and so interesting so many great anecdotes and he's such a good talker i loved those ones my favorite was kurt russell and john carpenter on the thing oh yeah talking and you can hear the ice in their whiskey clinking uh-huh as they're talking and and it's funny how we've sort of graduated beyond that now it's like well now i don't really care and yeah with my interpretation is what i want i don't want to hear the director yeah dismiss ideas i've had about the film because yeah people don't really do commentaries no not really you just did that for shits and giggles right yeah i did it because i'm i i had too much time on my hands. But I remember thinking at the time, fuck, man.

It took so much kind of technical wherewithal to do it and then reproduce it and then distribute it. I just remember being so impressed by that. I just remember thinking, oh, man, I don't know. I've got mixed feelings about it because it was such a colossal waste of time. No, it wasn't because everybody loved it. It was all our friend circle who you you gave it to i don't know i just remember thinking the the sort of the industry involved in it was just i mean it really was a grotesquely overextended joke because i did the

whole i did commentary for the whole thing i know but it was like long or something there's so many big train sketches were like they'd start funny and then they'd stop being funny and then they'd start being funny again and that's exactly exactly yeah but i did i spent a while doing it ken pretending that he directed it he's taking it very very seriously and he's like well uh in this in this scene jamie was interviewing frankie mournless frankie mournquist from from Malcolm in the Middle. And what we wanted to get out of Frankie was a sense of that ennui that he must have felt playing the Malcolm character. And all this kind of bullshit. It was like a little comedy gem

that existed in a tiny microcosmic universe. We'll see you next time. okay so i'm gonna fire at you uh something because you've done so much. It's crazy, man. You work hard. And I was just going to fire some things at you, and I want you to, I'm just going to use you as an anecdote machine. Okay? Yeah. I'm going to, like an anecdote slot machine. Right.

I'm just going to pull the handle. Put a noise in it. And then you've got to spit out a fun anecdote. Okay, here we go. Band of Brothers, 2001. Oh, man. Who wasn't on that show? Looking back on that now, I mean, I think they just hired every young actor of a certain age that was working in the UK.

They were shooting in Hatfield, like literally 10 minutes from where we are now. But everybody, like Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender. I remember me and Michael Fassbender were loading an aeroplane with parachutes in the deep, deep background of a shot and spent the entire thing complaining that we were just glorified extras. But having a lot of fun doing it,

I think, you know, being fairly irreverent. But it was, yeah, it was an amazing thing to be part of just because it was so huge. And when we were shooting the Eve of D-Day, there was quite a moment when we were on the runway surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of soldiers, of extras and the actors in the movie. And knowing that if this was the actual event,

then maybe 75% of the men on that field would be dead tomorrow which was a pretty you know extraordinary um feeling because it was so real we were all in our gear and it was you know the planes were there and everything and and it's so brilliantly conveyed that sense of of just dread and inevitability yeah my dad who was in the second world war he was d-day plus three as an officer and um he watched that show and he was very impressed by it was it yeah especially bastone yes yes that's a lot of people love that episode he went through after the battle at bastone which is when in this horrible icy winter yeah and they were just sort of trapped there for several weeks, these soldiers fighting.

And my dad said, yes, the way that the tree trunks exploded and split when they were hit by artillery was exactly the way he remembered it. Not that he was in that battle, but going through the aftermath of it. 24-hour party people, 2002. I was playing the role of it, sure. 24-Hour Party People, 2002. I was playing the role of a journalist, possibly Paul Morley, actually. We never quite named him, but we thought that might be who it was, at the funeral of Ian Curtis. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Was that the first time you'd worked with him? It was, and the last. But the first time I worked with Sean Harris, the actor, who has recently been the bad guy in Mission Impossible brilliant bad guy and he was playing Ian Curtis

and Sean's not a method actor particularly he takes his work very very seriously and is known for being quite serious he's actually a lot of fun he's very silly if you tease him out of his actor's shell he's an absolute riot to be around but that day

he was in that coffin all day long oh like just a dead body i never saw him move yeah that and that was with steve coogan who was uh playing the lead role of tony wilson and i think it was one of my first movies as well i love that film yeah it's a great film there was a great i mean they were living that film you could tell they were all of them sort of like they were so inhabiting those characters that like the band were misbehaving and they were playing happy mondays yeah they were getting into trouble that's first time i went with paddy concertine as well because he was playing rob gretton and he seemed real serious of course paddy'sdy's not serious at all. He's a really funny guy. But they were just in character, you know. And I remember feeling quite sort of wet behind the ears on that shoot.

Yeah. I haven't seen Paddy Constantine for a while. Last time I saw him, he was playing with his band. Yeah. Riding the low. Riding the low, yeah. But I do remember him being, he was sort of nutty on Hot Fuzz, wasn't he? Yeah, he was so naughty on hot fuzz him and rave

they were just they just inhabited those again you know not that paddy's a method actor at all but i think those two characters are so irreverent and paddy's hilarious like he'll go he'll act like an absolute nutcase right up until action and sometimes if you're trying to get in the moment for a shot it's not entirely conducive and edgar i remember used to get quite sort of uh frustrated at them because they would be acting like kids i remember feeling sorry for edgar because there was so much fun going on around him but he had to kind of keep it together yes but also edgar doesn't edgar stops kind of having fun on set like set because he's very concentrated

and he becomes a different person when he directs. He's sort of like, you know, because he feels everything so much and he's very much in the moment. And occasionally when things are going well and we're not behind time, which is very rare because he shoots a lot of stuff, he'll relax.

But yeah, Edgar's much more serious on set. I think some actors who work with him who don't know him are worried that he's not happy with them, but he's not. He's just in the moment. I mean, I never got any bad vibes off him or anything. He was lovely,

but I just remember thinking, oh, I wouldn't want to be a director. No. Have you directed still? No, I'm going to, though. Right. I'm looking forward to it. I do want to be a director,

and I do want to enjoy the process more. Edgar always seems to not enjoy it. I'm sure that's not true, because he he loves eats breathes sleeps film but i'm looking forward to living with something for a little bit longer and and spending time i'm developing a script with the writer and um i can't wait to just be behind the camera and not do any acting you know just look at the monitor and get the shots right and that really appeals to me i remember one evening after hot fuzz when we all went out and i think uh nick frost was there and paddy was there being pretty weird and funny and uh edgar was there and at one point you and i

were talking over in a corner and we sort of bonded a little bit over feeling a bit jilted by our respective creative lovers because joe and edgar were collaborating in earnest at that point that's right we were like the kind of the ones left behind yeah yeah and i remember saying to you like do you feel weird about it because i do and i remember that i remember me and edgar were doing something a big talk and and Joe came along. And Joe was going to do the second shift that day, I think, with Edgar. They were writing Ant-Man or something like that. Yeah, I think it was Ant-Man they were working on.

And Joe turned up at the office, and I sort of had to leave. And it was such a strange feeling of like, all right, well, I'll be going then. And then going down the stairs and sort of sharing. Have a nice time. Yeah. Yeah, it's strange. And I did feel a little bit odd about that, because Edgar and I always wrote together, you know,

and then suddenly he was writing with Joe. And I felt the same thing when he wrote with Michael Bacall as well. But then I'm sure he felt the same thing when Nick and I went and wrote Paul. It is odd, that double act. Not that you are a double act. I guess with you and Joe, because you were Adam and Joe, that's how you were known. Yeah, I suppose, yeah.

And so for your own feeling about it, it must have been a bit strange. It was. I mean, it was just a difficult time anyway just trying to figure out what I was going to do. Yeah. Joe always wanted to sort of... He'd made noises about drifting into directing or whatever. Well, we always... I mean, I've spoken about this a lot before, but that's what our friendship was based on, was the idea that we were going to make films together.

Right, right. And certainly Joe was better placed to do that than I ever was. And it was his dream much more than it was mine. And he had a proper passion and a proper talent for it, way more than I did. But I certainly wanted to be involved i kind of imagined that i would be um you know the simon peg to his edgar wright at that point you know i'd like be in it and yeah i'd be really funny and i'd be great and uh it would be really good i had to come to terms with the fact that i wasn't really best place to do that yeah yeah actually he we didn't work that well

in that way you know and he had to find another way of doing things and it was quite a painful process to let it all unfold and yeah i'm sure slot into place and you didn't ever feel like you wanted to do to sort of like get a project and and and bring it to fruition yourself like without him or or like i mean i'm talking about filmically i've done tons of stuff without him but i mean no no i just didn't have um i didn't have the drive and the ideas those are the only two things i was missing i had everything else except the actual will to do it and the ideas apart from that i was there but you're the guy that did the commentary on the prairie.

You're the most motivated kind of creator I've ever met. But motivated to make things that are completely worthless. And have no practical value whatsoever. It's very admirable. Oh my god. And now, he won't even tell me the fucking doodle story! Wait. This is an advert

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Continue fashioning. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Simon Pegg there. Very good to see Simon again after all these years. I'm very grateful to him indeed for his time, for picking me up from the station, for giving me some tea for the Bowie album, Peter and the Wolf. Thanks, man. And let's hope that I don't get in trouble with cornballs. I don't think I got any particularly privileged information out of Simon there. I'm due to record the Christmas special with Joe in a few

weeks so we'll see if the atmosphere is a bit frosty from jay corn. Quick recommendation for you before I say goodbye today. It's a blog that I've been reading recently. It's one of the very few places on the internet that doesn't leave me feeling angry, dirty and ashamed. Although, admittedly, I may be partly to blame for that situation. But this blog is called Brain Pickings. I'm sure a lot of you know it. It's very successful. It is the work of a Bulgarian journalist called Maria Popova, P-O-P-O-V-A. She lives in New York. And Maria's blog is like, well, it's like a lot of others in that it's a series of posts about things that she considers interesting, that she's kind of archiving from a variety of sources, but unlike a lot of other blogs, it does not rely exclusively on fun, but totally inconsequential distractions. The articles

that Maria Popover puts together on brain pickings are consistently interesting and thoughtful and accessible. They're about subjects like history and art and philosophy and current events and they often take the form of sort of mini essays interspersed with excerpts from books she's read on those subjects. They're very well chosen and well edited. Many of the extracts she chooses are concerned with the interplay between hope and cynicism and the difficulty of keeping a truly open mind, especially in the current global climate. So if you want an antidote to the kind of shouting and angry

judgmentalism that you get on a lot of places on the internet these days, then give brain pickings a go as a thoughtful and inspiring palate cleanser. I've posted links in the description of this podcast to a couple of brain pickings articles that I read recently and found very interesting. So see what you reckon. That's it for this week. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support.

Thanks, Seamus. Really appreciate it. Thanks to ACAST for hosting this and many other great, great podcasts. Rosie, shall we head back? The sun is almost down It is windy and cold And the sofa beckons Till next time We share the same mind space

Stay fresh with the beat Keep your room nice and neat Watch what you eat That's the word on the street I love you Bye! Keep your room nice and neat. Watch what you eat. That's the word on the street. I love you. Bye! Bye. Thank you. ស្រូវាប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ប់ Thank you.