‘No, You Don’t F*cking Need ‘Shaun of the Dead II’’: Simon Pegg Says Shut Up About the Cornetto Trilogy
Simon Pegg doesn’t care to look back on his early work. If anything, the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star calls nostalgia “a neurological disorder.” And no, he doesn’t want to have a nice cold pint and wait for this to blow over at the fucking Winchester.
Last summer, the creative duo of Pegg and his once-and-maybe-not-future collaborator Edgar Wright reunited in their native England to explore the possibility of adding a fourth entry to their shared filmography after nearly a decade of separate massive Hollywood success since the finale of what they named The Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. Between the inaugural Shaun of the Dead, the beloved Hot Fuzz and the concluding The World’s End, the director and writer/star pair produced some of the most iconic comedies of the 21st century — and then they moved on.
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“Whatever Edgar and I do next, we’re not going to rely on what we’ve done before,” Pegg told The Guardian, explaining that progress on their next film has slowed significantly. He added cheekily, “I like the idea of pissing people off. There’s something fun about torching everything. Everything that people think we are, that’s what we won’t be.” First item to be torched — his fans.
“If I ever do an Instagram Live or whatever, people are always like, ‘I need Shaun of the Dead 2 in my life,’” Pegg complained of the Cornetto stans who still spam his social media posts with a small rotation of quotes and GIFs from movies he wrote 20 years ago. “I’m like, ‘No, you don’t fucking need Shaun of the Dead 2! The last thing you need is Shaun of the Dead 2! It’s done. Move on!’”
Pegg, who has appeared in the last four Mission: Impossible movies, acknowledged a moment of historical irony stemming from an interview he and Wright gave after the release of Shaun of the Dead, in which he was asked whether his newfound Hollywood success would steal him away from his roots. Pegg boldly declared, “It’s not like we’re going to go away and do, I don’t know, Mission: Impossible III,” shortly before the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia title card flashed “Simon Pegg Does Mission: Impossible III.”
Pegg acknowledged the irony of the gaff, explaining that it came from a place of frustration that his authenticity could be called into question. Or as he put it, “At that time, there was this attitude that anyone who went off to Hollywood was betraying their roots in some sense or selling out. It’s not like you cross some misty bridge at night and never come home again. So many people assume that I live over there. But, you know, I live in Hertfordshire.”
Despite his devotion to his home, one thing Pegg doesn’t do anymore is look back — the former nerd icon admitted that he’s “aged out” of his old image, saying, “I don’t feel like I’m that geeky guy any more, particularly. I don’t have the same interests I had when I was 35 or 40 even. I’d much rather watch Succession than some sci-fi.”
Later on in the interview, Pegg’s frustration with his fans’ demands of a return to the kind of action-comedy projects that put him on the map turned into anger at the nostalgia-dominated media landscape as a whole, saying he’s sick of “this culture of infantilised adulthood, all these grown-ass men arguing about fucking superheroes online, and meanwhile the world is falling apart in so many different ways. And that’s why we will all go to hell. Because no one will grow the fuck up any more. Everybody’s so plugged into being a child, you know?”
So, yep, no Shaun of the Dead 2 for you. I mean, how else will we all grow up?
