Interviews
[Interview] Simon Pegg Discusses New Film ‘Kill Me Three Times’
He’s killed zombies, declared his right as a human to be a screw up, and lifted the veil on a town’s secret society Bad Boys II style, but in his latest flick, Simon Pegg is just out for blood. He goes by Charlie Wolfe, which suits him, since he spends most of his time hunting, although his prey is usually walking around on two legs. As a hit man, Charlie’s line of work isn’t the cleanest to begin with, so when Jack, a bar owner with a bad temper, tells Charlie that he wants to use his services to get rid of his cheating wife, Charlie hesitates, but only for a moment. When he’s offered enough money, he agrees, and before he knows it, Charlie’s got in a web of thieves, murders, adulterers and scammers. Charlie might have walked into Eagle’s Nest as the baddest man in town, but he’ll leave with his tail between his legs before it’s over.
I caught up with Simon Pegg a few days ago, and we chatted briefly about his time as an assassin on the set of Kill Me Three Times. In the interview, we discuss what it’s like to play a villain, the legacy and cult following of Shaun of the Dead, and his collaborative process with screenwriter Doug Jung on the upcoming Star Trek 3.
Kalyn Corrigan: How did you go about joining this project? What was the process like?
Simon Pegg: Well, I got the script sent to me and I’d had a really sort of busy year in terms of travel. I’d been all over the world, and I’d spent a long time away from home, and it was the end of the year and I didn’t really want to go away again. Particularly, not to the other side of the world because it just felt like too much and I was planning on sort of just being with my family for the rest of the year. But, I read it, and it was a great script, and it felt like something I really wanted to do, a character that I wanted to play, so I said, “I’d like to do this, but can you shoot me out in two weeks?” Because that was sort of like not saying no, because I didn’t want to say no. And they said okay! So I started talking to Kriv on the phone and email just sort of getting Charlie’s sort of look and stuff, and I went out and did all of my stuff in one specific block, which I am eternally grateful for, because it meant that they had to shoot the beginning and the end of the movie in the same week, but it meant that I could do it. Sometimes when a script comes along, it’s hard to say no if it seems that fun.
KC: I know that you’re usually known for playing sweet and endearing nice guys in your films, so how much fun was it to play the villain?
SP: Oh it was great! I liked the fact that the movie asks you to sort of side with the most evil character, in a way. It’s like Charlie is the audience’s way into Eagle’s Nest and all of the other characters are sort of seen through his eyes. It was an interesting proposition to have the bad guy be the audience’s POV. I just really liked the idea of playing such an amoral bastard. He’s fun, even though he’s horrible.
KC: Yeah, by the end of the film I would definitely say that he’s probably the most morally sound character.
SP: Probably, yeah. (Laughs) At least he has principles. They’re warped and dreadful principles, but at least he sticks to them.
KC: Definitely. So, what was your relationship like with your costars?
SP: Oh we had a great time. It was one of those where we all hit the ground running. We all sort of arrived at the same time, and we were staying at a casino in Perth and all hanging out with each other. I really, immediately bonded with Sullivan Stapleton and Alice and Teresa. It’s fortunate when you get an ensemble group if you all gel because it just makes things a lot easier and a lot happier, you know? I think I’m a big believer in a happy set, meaning better work. And also having Bryan Brown, Bryan, who’s a bit of a legend. Not just an Aussie legend, but F/X, F/X2, Cocktail, to work with an elder statesman was great, and have him be nice, as well. You can kind of forgive older actors for being a bit jaded and sort of a bit unfriendly, but he was so lovely, which was nice. It was fortunate. That’s stage one, always, is “are we going to get on?” I think being away from home, we were all staying in Perth, all staying in the same hotel. Me and Sully and Luke used to go work out together, so you know, bonding. Bonding on the weights machines.
KC: So, in both Kill Me Three Times and Hot Fuzz, you seem pretty sure handed with a gun. So, did you undergo a lot of training, or is this something that you’ve been doing for a long time?
SP: I mean, we don’t really have any access to that kind of fire power at home in the U.K., but obviously when you do a film, even a comedy like Hot Fuzz, you’re trained with a weapon. So, I did a day’s training with a weapon for Kill Me Three Times. I had to look like I knew what I was doing so, with the big range rifle and even the smaller guns you got to look like you know how to use them. So, I had a fun day just firing those off, but if you gave me one now I wouldn’t know what to do with it. (Laughs)
KC: Or so you say.
SP: Yeah. (Laughs)
KC: Looking back at the legacy of Shaun of the Dead, what does it mean to you to have such a strong cult following over the last ten years, and especially the reception in America, which has been extremely positive?
SP: Yeah, it’s lovely. I mean you do each job and you never really know what will come off of each job. You can speculate and have faith in it, but you never really know if it’s gonna be a hit or a miss or what. I think Shaun of the Dead was a handy calling card for us, it was our first movie, so for it to be embraced like it was here has meant for huge opportunities which has been great, so I’ll always have a deep affection for that movie. And I think, what we were talking about, you know in the U.K. we grow up watching a lot of American culture, you know, a lot of American television. The U.K. television buys up American T.V. so, and obviously cinema, we watch a lot of. So, for us, we were speaking a language that I think the American audiences understood. It the zombie movie, which is an American tradition, we just sort of put it through the skewer of the British point of view, and I think that’s why it kind of hit, is because people got it. It didn’t feel foreign to the American audience. It felt familiar. So, to build up a cult following has been handy, to say the least.
KC: Are you and Edgar Wright working on a new trilogy perhaps?
SP: He’s emailing me today, saying “When can we talk? Can we meet?” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.” Uh, absolutely. I don’t know about a trilogy. I mean, Shaun of the Dead, we never knew that it would evolve into three movies, but when we made Hot Fuzz, we realized that we were able to to sort of like do variations on a theme, and then wrap it up quite neatly into a three movie series. The next film that we do won’t have to be banned by any of the rules that the Cornetto films were. They had to be set in the U.K., in a contemporary setting. The ones that follow, whether they are in a group or single, they won’t have to do that. It’s our oyster, kind of. I hope.
KC: With shows like The X-Files and Twin Peaks making a big return to television, do you think that there might be a chance that Spaced might jump on the bandwagon and come back to life?
SP: Yeah, that’s very exciting. Um, I don’t know. I think it would be very hard to get Edgar back to television now. Although, having said that, television is a far more cinematic thing than it used to be. Television series now are more like long form films, and the kind of actors that television attracts, you know, it seems to be where a lot of serious acting is happening. But to get Edgar back into a sitcom would be very difficult. Because, when you watch Spaced, you can see that he was always going to be a film director, and now he’s in the world that he was aiming at. And we couldn’t make Spaced without Edgar. I don’t know if it would be worth doing anyway, because it was about a very specific time in our lives, and we were speaking to a specific generation of people. I’m forty-five now, you know, Tim was like twenty-seven, so I don’t know if I could ever go back. It would have to be something for like, crusty millennials it would have to be as kind of relevant for old people.
KC: Well you don’t look a day over thirty.
SP: Bless your heart.
KC: So, you’re attached to write the upcoming Star Trek 3 film. Congratulations, that’s such an honor.
SP: Yeah, it is, thank you.
KC: So I was wondering, since you and Doug Jung are writing the script together, what’s the collaborative process with him like?
SP: Doug and I met for the first time a few weeks ago in London, and we kind of hit it off, fortunately, he’s a cool guy. We’re also working with a team of Bad Robot, with Lindsey Weber and Bryan Burk, who are friends we both know, and Justin Lin, obviously, who’s directing. It’s not an ideal way to work, to be, sort of like “okay, we need to make this film in four months, write it”. You have to kind of make it backwards. The production wants stuff. They’re like, “So what are we building? What are we designing?” We’re kind of having to come up with ideas and give them to production before we’re even sure that they’re the right ideas. But so far, it’s working out alright. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we’re in a very necessity type situation at the moment. I’m hoping to get to Bad Robot while I’m here and put in a few hours over there, and then Doug will come over to the U.K. next week and we’ll keep plugging away at it.
KC: Yeah, I was going to ask, do you spend a lot of time together? Or is it mainly on the phone, or on Skype?
SP: If I’m writing collaboratively, I want to be in the room with that person, because there’s just no substitute for it. I’ve had, before, when we started, this sort of creative meetings. I was on a conference call to Bad Robot, trying to get in to the conversation and not really being able to because I wasn’t in the room, you know. We will have to do a little bit of long distance stuff, because that’s just the way it is, but hopefully, as much as we can, we’ll be together in the room.
KC: Is it like, you write a couple of pages, and then he writes a couple of pages —
SP: We haven’t gotten that far yet. At the moment we’re fleshing out the outline. We’ve arrived at a story, and started to fill in the sort of detail, but until we get more specific, then we’ll be like, “you write that scene, I’ll write this scene”. It remains to be seen exactly how we’ll do it. It’s a learning process.
KC: So what is your process like Doug like vs. your writing process with Edgar Wright?
SP: Well with Edgar, we usually have a lot more time, for starters. It’s not like the sands of time are running out as they are with Star Trek. They want Star Trek out in 2016 because it’s the fiftieth anniversary, so, we are going into production in the summer no matter what. With Edgar, we’ll sit and talk, we’ll go away for the weekend together and just come up with ideas, and then we’ll sit and maybe just watch movies, just to get ourselves in the mood. And we live, or we did live close, now he lives here, but we usually get into an office together. We’ll put the script onto a big screen, and one of us will type and keep pace, and we swap and alternate, always in the same room, though.
KC: Always in the same room?
SP: Yeah, yeah. Because otherwise, if you’re doing stuff on your own, it’ll invariably change, because the collaborative process is compromise and meeting of minds. You might write a scene on your own and then give it to the other one and then they’ll change it, and then they send it back to you, and then you have to change it again, but if you’re in the same room together, that cuts out a lot of leg work.
KC: Has your process changed over the course of time?
SP: It’s evolved, I think. When I look back at Shaun of the Dead, it’s not changed that much, we’re just better at it, I think. We’re just technically better at the whole process.
KC: Yeah, you have it down to a T now.
SP: (Laughs) Yeah, we’ve written a few, so we kind of know how to do it, kind of thing. We’re not feeling our way as much as we did in the first place.
KC: Is there anything you can tell me about Star Trek 3?
SP: God no.
KC: Doesn’t hurt to try.
SP: (Laughs) There’s not much I know about it, to be honest. No, absolutely. And you know, J.J., as a producer of this film and a director of the others, has always instilled in us the importance of protecting the audience from themselves. You know, people kind of, even people who don’t want spoilers will kind of crave knowledge about things because they just want to know something going in. I think the best way to watch any film is to go in blind. In a way, trailers are detrimental to the experience of watching film. Something J.J. gets criticized for is that all he’s doing is trying to protect the experience of the audience, so they go in and they’re genuinely surprised by it. So you’ll hear nothing from me.
KC: So, what about your other upcoming projects? I read that you’re going to be in a film called Man Up.
SP: Yes, Man Up. It’s gonna be at Tribeca Film Festival, it’s out in the U.K. on May 29th. I did that with Lake Bell who is an American actress who does a very convincing British accent in the movie, she plays a Brit in the movie. She’s an amazing actress. That’s coming out.
KC: What’s that about?
SP: It’s an unashamedly traditional romantic comedy. It’s written by a writer called Tess Morris who wrote the script on Spec for Big Talk Productions who made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, because she likes the production company. It was just a really, really fun romantic comedy that didn’t kind of apologize for what it was. In fact, it embraced what it was and as such is more honest, I think, and more enjoyable than any recent attempts at the genre where they’ve tried to undercut it or be subversive. The fact is, we know the journey of the romantic comedy, it’s the root we go to watch it for, it’s to see how they get to the end. And it was just a really appealing idea and it’s about a woman who accidentally, or purposely deceives a guy into thinking that she’s his blind date, because she is mistaken for his blind date she just thinks, “Oh, fuck it. I’m just gonna go along with it.” So they end up having this crazy night together and then the truth is out, and then, you know, love blossoms.
KC: That’s great. So, what can you tell me about Mission: Impossible 5?
SP: That we finished it.
KC: You did? Wow! (Laughs)
SP: We did, like two weeks ago, we wrapped, and the trailer just broke online, which is really exciting.
KC: It looks fantastic.
SP: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be great, I’m really excited about it. It was a real fun shoot. You know, I’ve played Benji three times now, and it’s really nice to keep coming back to him and seeing how he changes, because he’s gone on his own little journey through the last three movies, from being a schlub in the lab, to being a full on agent, and he’s still the same guy essentially. He’s still the guy who knows how to work the technical stuff, but you know, his experiences have informed his as well, so he’s not the sort of newbie that he was in Ghost Protocol. He’s been out there a little bit. He’s more of a bit more hardened, which is kind of cool to say.
KC: Yeah, a bit more of an action star.
SP: Yeah, he’s not as much of an ingenue, it doesn’t mean that he’s changed in any way.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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