I’ve always admired actor Simon Pegg. He’s probably best known for the trilogy of films that he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright and starred in with Nick Frost: Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World’s End (2013). More mainstream audiences know him as Benji Dunn in the Mission: Impossible movies and for his role USS Enterprise chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott in the more recent Star Trek films. Pegg goes out on a limb in his new film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, playing a disgruntled London psychiatrist who embarks on a global quest to try to find some meaning in his life. I thought Pegg was excellent in the film, which was directed by Peter Chelsom from a screenplay by Chelsom and Maria Von Heland. Hector and the Search for Happiness also stars Toni Collette, Rosamund Pike, Stellan Skarsgard, Jean Reno, and Christopher Plummer. I spoke to Simon Pegg just after the film’s U.S. release.
Danny Miller: I really enjoyed following Hector on his crazy journey. Is “happiness” something you’ve spent much time explicitly thinking about in your own life?
Simon Pegg: I think it is. During the process of making the film we were off on location virtually the whole time so we all ended up having dinner together at the end of each day and talking about what makes us happy and why we are or aren’t happy. It’s a fascinating subject. I think we spend a lot of time mistaking things that are proxies for happiness as actual happiness. I think there’s a much deeper sense of happiness that comes with being all right with who you are and what your place is in the universe. You can say that a walk on the beach makes you happy, but a walk on the beach won’t make you happy if you’re not happy before you start walking!
How much did you learn about your own relationship with happiness by playing Hector?
There are a lot of misfires in Hector’s journey. He goes through a lot of tripe — these greeting-card aphorisms as he’s trying to figure things out for himself. “Maybe it’s that,” he thinks, like when he says happiness is the freedom to love two women at the same time. Now that’s a deeply misogynistic statement, isn’t it! But then he finds some real truths like “avoiding unhappiness is not the route to happiness” which I think is so crucial. Happiness is not some kind of rainbow world that you can never reach. The key is to happiness is to enjoy the process of trying to attain it!
I think one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that a happy life does not mean a total absence of sadness.
Absolutely. You have to experience pain and fear and loss and all those “negative” things. They will help you define what happiness is.
This role is something of a “departure” for you, if I can use that dumb term. Did you have any worries that your fans might not accept you in such a different kind of movie and part?
No, I really didn’t because you just can’t run your affairs in terms of what other people might think.
Yeah, talk about a prescription for unhappiness!
Exactly. I really wanted to do something that stretched me as an actor and made me flex different muscles. I’m often referred to as a “comic” but I don’t really see myself that way. As far as I’m concerned, I’m an actor. I think what Edgar, Nick, and I do is a lot more serious than some people give us credit for. Particularly a film like The World’s End which is essentially a tragedy in some respects. But, look, if you start worrying what the fans are going to think, you’re lost. Of course you hope they’re going to go along with you — you hope that they’ll evolve with you rather than demanding that you stay in the same place.
I’m still coming down from the high of talking to Christopher Plummer about this film. I tried to find the strength to not bring up The Sound of Music during our chat but I failed. Was that a film that had meaning for you as a kid?
Oh, absolutely, are you kidding? But I decided when I met Chris to go the Star Trek route instead since we’ve both been in Star Trek movies! Chris is hilarious, though. There’s this myth that you’re not allowed to mention The Sound of Music around him, but it’s completely untrue! He definitely downplays that experience in interviews in a kind of charming self-effacing way. The guy is an incredible actor and has extraordinary longevity. To get to actually work with him and to watch him play this kind of mercurial professor of happiness was such a joy. He played it beautifully and he gives what’s probably the most important speech in the movie since the whole film is essentially about the important of staying connected to your childhood outlook.
I loved the animated sequences in the film and the nods to Tintin. Funny that you were actually in Spielberg’s Adventures of Tintin a few years ago!
I think those references set up the journey in this movie. It’s a kind of fable told from a childlike perspective, these are not really the musings of an adult. What I really like about this film is that you’re constantly reminded that you’re watching something artificial, like a storybook — the way the characters are described, the way some of the countries are depicted like China being the land of mystery and temptation — it’s all broad strokes. Chris’s character gets to the heart of that idea of remembering to see the world as you did when you were a child and reflect your adult self through that prism because it will enable you to decipher the complexities of being a grown-up a little easier. We get so fucking bogged down when we get older with cynicism and responsibility and we lose sight of the purity of emotions that children have. If you can just keep a thread of that, it really helps to be happier as a grown-up.
Were you surprised by the cynicism in some of the critics’ responses to the film?
Yes, actually. With the British critics, especially, there was a real resistance to the movie. Aside from some really disappointing first-year film school readings of the film, there was also a lot of discomfort with how open the film was in even suggesting that it’s possible to look for happiness. We live in a very cynical world and I’m from a nation of cynics. I like that we are looking at this topic. It’s something that should be embraced — even if it’s just to offer a little hope!
I enjoyed the dynamic between you and Rosamund Pike’s character in the film. There are definitely points where we don’t know whether we should be rooting for them or not!
Oh, absolutely. When you see them at the beginning, they’re incredibly dysfunctional, they’re basically enabling each other’s shortcomings. Rosamund’s character is a control freak and my character wants to be mothered because he’s this weird man-child. Their relationship totally facilitates those defects so you kind of think maybe they’d be better off apart. But that changes once they get some distance and she goes on a kind of journey, too, even though she stays in London. Rosamund and I talked a lot about what isn’t seen with her character. She probably had a little fling with her boss and then had some time to think and let some chaos into her life which she’d never done before.
It’s crazy that you shot this film all over the world on the budget of a small independent film. How the heck did you do that?
We were roughing it a lot of the time. I remember in Tibet, for example, we stayed in hostels where the toilets were holes in the ground. It was great, though, because it allowed me to feel more a part of Hector’s process. We spent time in South Africa. When you go to Soweto and other townships, you realize that apartheid still exists in some forms, it’s going to be there socially for generations to come because the damage was so pervasive. To be amongst that and see people who clearly have a more refined and sophisticated idea of what happiness is even though they experience such hardships on a daily basis — that is truly humbling. I’m not advocating hardship as a route to happiness but it certainly brings everything into sharp relief. Sometimes the more comfortable we get, the less content we are because we lose sight of what is really important. It’s a modern problem. As Christopher says in the movie, we’ve become a colony of unhappy people.