Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg: A Marxist Reading of the Zombie

His undergraduate thesis at the University of Bristol was titled "A Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses." Thirteen years later he co-wrote a film in which a north London shop assistant fails to notice that the dead have risen, because his life already looks exactly like that. *Shaun of the Dead* is usually filed as a very good joke. It is more accurate to call it the thesis, filmed — a comedy whose entire engine is the observation that late-capitalist routine and zombification are visually indistinguishable.

Brockworth, and a Change of Name

Simon John Beckingham was born on 14 February 1970 in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, to Gillian Rosemary Smith, a civil servant, and John Henry Beckingham, a jazz musician who sold keyboards. His parents divorced when he was seven; his mother remarried and he took his stepfather's surname.

He went to Castle Hill Primary, Brockworth Comprehensive and The King's School, Gloucester, then moved at sixteen to Stratford-upon-Avon College to study English literature and theatre, and on to Bristol, graduating in 1991 with a BA in theatre, film and television. At university he performed in a comedy troupe with the wonderfully juvenile name David Icke and the Orphans of Jesus, alongside David Walliams.

Stand-Up as a Means of Control

He went into stand-up for a reason he has stated plainly and which explains the whole career: "comedy was something I enjoyed but also because it offered me a certain autonomy that I wouldn't have if I was sitting and waiting for the phone to ring as an actor." He would rather write his own parts than audition for other people's.

The 1990s were spent building a CV in British comedy's best rooms: *Six Pairs of Pants* (1995), *Asylum* (1996), *Faith in the Future*, *Big Train*, *Hippies*, Radio 4's *The 99p Challenge*, guest turns in *Brass Eye*, *I'm Alan Partridge* and *Black Books*, and a slot in Steve Coogan's 1998 stage show. He was a familiar face long before he was a famous one.

Spaced

*Spaced* (1999–2001), co-created and co-written with Jessica Hynes and directed by Edgar Wright, is the origin of everything that followed. Pegg played Tim Bisley and wrote the character of Mike Watt specifically for his friend Nick Frost. The show's method — a sitcom about slackers shot in the visual grammar of the films the slackers love — assembled the team and invented the register. It was nominated for the BAFTA situation comedy award, and one of its fantasy sequences involved zombies.

Three Flavours

That sequence became *Shaun of the Dead* (2004), which Pegg co-wrote with Wright: a romantic comedy that happens to be a zombie film, or the reverse. It won them the Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay and the British Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay, plus the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy. George A. Romero, the genre's founder, invited both men to cameo in *Land of the Dead*.

*Hot Fuzz* (2007) applied the same method to the American action picture, with Pegg as an over-qualified London officer exiled to a picturesque village. *The World's End* (2013) closed what became known as the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and brought Saturn nominations for both his writing and his acting. In between he co-wrote *Paul* (2011) with Frost — a script that made the 2008 Brit List of the best unproduced British screenplays — and pointedly reversed their usual arrangement, handing Frost the lead and taking the sidekick himself.

The Nerd Hat Trick

Asked after *Shaun of the Dead* whether he was about to disappear into Hollywood, Pegg said: "It's not like we're going to go away and do, I don't know, Mission: Impossible III." He was then cast in *Mission: Impossible III*. Benji Dunn has now appeared in six films, from 2006 through to *The Final Reckoning* (2025).

He played Montgomery Scott in J. J. Abrams's *Star Trek* (2009) and its sequels, and co-wrote *Star Trek Beyond* (2016). He had already played the Editor in *Doctor Who* in 2005, and he turned up under prosthetics as Unkar Plutt in *Star Wars: The Force Awakens*. He totted it up himself on *The Graham Norton Show*: "I've now done the ultimate nerd hat trick — Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek." He also voices Buck in the *Ice Age* films, published a memoir, *Nerd Do Well*, in 2010, and received an honorary fellowship from the University of Gloucestershire in December 2008.

The Thing He Said About Comic Books

In 2015 he told *Radio Times* that audiences had been "infantilised by our own taste," that "now we're essentially all consuming very childish things — comic books, superheroes," and called it "a kind of dumbing down in a way." Coming from a man who was at that point playing Scotty, this went badly. His response was a blog post titled "Big Mouth Strikes Again" in which he conceded the "'dumbing down' comment came off as a huge generalisation by an A-grade asshorn," insisted "I did not mean that science fiction or fantasy are dumb, far from it," cited *Ex Machina* and *Mad Max: Fury Road* as "very grown up films," and signed off: "I am still a nerd and proud."

Sobriety

In July 2018 he told *The Guardian* about depression and alcoholism. "When I watch Mission: Impossible III, I can see where I was then, which was fairly lost, and unhappy, and an alcoholic," he said. "I'm not ashamed of what happened... But I am not proud of it, either — I don't think it's cool, like I was Mr. Rock 'n' Roll, blackout and all that shit. It wasn't, it was just terrible." He entered rehab before *Ghost Protocol*, used court orders to keep it from the tabloids, and has stayed sober. He married Maureen McCann in Glasgow in July 2005, with Frost as best man; they have one daughter. He is an atheist, a Greenpeace activist since 2021, and a signatory to a 2020 letter calling for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Why Simon Is Called a Genius

Of the working actors to whom the word gets casually attached, Pegg has the strongest claim, and it rests on writing rather than performing. The distinguishing quality is architectural: the ability to build a comedy in which a throwaway line in the first ten minutes becomes the mechanism of the climax. *Shaun of the Dead* is constructed almost entirely of these — a plan recited as a joke and then executed as a plot. It is the reason a first-time feature by two television comedians won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay, an honour voted by horror writers, not comedians. That is genre literacy operating as engineering, and Pegg's academic formation shows in it: the Bristol thesis on hegemonic discourse in 1970s cinema is recognisably the same mind that noticed a supermarket queue looks like a shambling horde.

Two honest deductions. First, he does not work alone — Wright directed all three films and shares every screenplay credit, and Hynes co-created *Spaced*; the achievement is collaborative and Pegg has never claimed otherwise. Second, as a performer his range is narrow, essentially one register of anxious decent Englishman, and his largest-grossing work consists of well-played supporting parts in franchises other people built. He is a formidably intelligent comic writer with a good actor attached. "Genius" overstates it; "the smartest structural comedian of his British generation" does not.

Legacy

He made the most durable British comedy film of the century out of a joke from a Channel 4 sitcom, and then spent twenty years inside the American blockbusters he was simultaneously worrying about. That contradiction is the interesting thing about him — a man who wrote a Marxist thesis on popular cinema and then went to work for it, complained about it in public, apologised, and carried on. He calls himself a nerd and proud. The proud part was always the argument.

Achievements

• Worked as actor, film producer and writer