SCREEN LI FE
SIMON Pegg is the British actor who has conquered zombies, aliens and Hollywood. Now, on the back of starring in two Star Trek films and being a vital cog in the Mission: Impossible franchise, he is returning to more earthly human pursuits in Hector and the Search for Happiness.
In the film, perhaps the first aimed squarely at an audience more his own age since 2008’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the 44-year-old plays Hector, a psychiatrist dealing with a crisis many of us might have faced at some point in our lives: am I in the right relationship? His relationship with his live-in girlfriend Clara has gone stale, so he decides the time is right to broaden his horizons and duly abandons his girlfriend and patients to travel the world.
“The thing about Hector is that he sets out to find out what makes people happy but he is really trying to find out what makes him happy, because he has no happiness,” Pegg said.
The film is adapted from the 2002 debut novel by François Lelord, a French psychiatrist. Like Hector, whose shelves are full of books by Freud and Jung, Pegg believes that what happens to us in childhood defines us as adults.
“A lot of us still go through life regarding love and sex as we did when we were seven,” he said. “And we take that into adulthood.” Pegg was seven when his parents divorced. Born Simon John Beckingham in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, his father was a jazz musician and keyboard salesman and his mother a civil servant. He took the name Pegg from his stepfather. Many of the characters he has created as an adult and writer, and those he has been drawn to as an actor, have been recovering from broken relationships.
The TV show Spaced starts with Pegg trying to cope with the aftermath of a break-up. Shaun of the Dead, the first of the so-called Cornetto Trilogy that he wrote to be directed by his friend and collaborator Edgar Wright, sees him put his friends before his girlfriend. In both Hot Fuzz, where he plays a lonely policeman redeployed in Gloucestershire, and The World’s End, in which he plays an alcoholic trying to recapture teenage glories, his character is defiantly single.
Does this fascination with broken relationships go back to his childhood and his parents’ divorce?
“Well, that’s the interesting thing, not just with Hector, but also in (his 2012 horror film) A Fantastic Fear of Everything, there is the idea of the wounded child,” he responds.
“We all have it, this moment when we realise that we are an entity separate from our mother, we are individual and we are going to die, all that kind of stuff. Our relationship with all the key emotional touchstones of life, they are established at a very young age and you never really look back on it, unless you have therapy. You never go back and think: ‘Oh, that’s why I’m like that with women. That’s why I’ve been looking for that kind of person. That’s why I’ve been trying to find a father, a mother, whatever ...’ “
If it wasn’t for a break-up, he reveals, he would never have had the motivation to write Spaced, the 1990s TV show in which he made his name. “There was a key moment in my life when I broke up with a girlfriend – about 20 years ago now – and that formed the basis of Spaced. That kind of heartbreak, which was partly because there is nothing so inspiring as pain.”
- The Independent