Simon Pegg: America's most wanted

The road to Hollywood is strewn with battered and bruised British comedians who were once touted as the next Peter Sellers - Lenny Henry and Lee Evans over here, Steve Coogan and Rik Mayall over there - so how come Simon Pegg has made it in one piece? His rom-zom-com, Shaun of the Dead, was a surprise smash in 2004, and has since sold 1.3m DVDs in the US. Variety even quotes the unlikely statistic that - according to the film's distributor Universal - 40 per cent of all American 17- to 39-year-olds count themselves as fans of Shaun of the Dead.

But in box-office terms Shaun has been soundly truncheoned by this year's follow-up, Hot Fuzz, which has made nearly $20m in the US and $50m elsewhere in the world: not bad for a comedy about two West Country village bobbies. The films' star and co-writer is now a bosom buddy of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, he's on hanging-out terms with Quentin Tarantino, and he's had Tom Cruise's phone number on his mobile ever since he took the Q role in Mission: Impossible III. Coming up is Run, Fat Boy, Run, with Thandie Newton, directed by his friend from Friends, David Schwimmer. And he's just started rehearsals for How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, an adaptation of Toby Young's memoir about his abortive stint on Vanity Fair in New York.

As lucrative as Pegg's own brace of films has been, How To Lose Friends marks the first time that Hollywood has seen him as a leading man, able to stand out opposite A-list Americans. "I've been cast in it for a very long time," says Pegg. "It was early last year when I read it and liked it. And then suddenly it started getting cast, and Kirsten Dunst had a part, and then Jeff Bridges was in it, and Danny Huston. I started to think, 'Jesus Christ! I'm out of my depth here!' It is kind of scary and weird, but it happened slowly, by increments."

You could say the same for Pegg's rise-and-rise in general. Now aged 37, he's no overnight sensation, but someone who has proceeded along the path to stardom in careful steps.

First, he began performing at school assemblies in Birmingham. Next, he studied drama at Bristol University, where he opened a comedy club with another student, David Walliams. After graduation he made the requisite move to London, and was spotted on the stand-up circuit by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, the creators of Father Ted, who invited him to audition for their sketch show, Big Train. In 1999, he appeared in the sitcom he co-wrote with Jessica Stevenson, Spaced. This was directed by Edgar Wright, and it featured Pegg's best friend and former flatmate, Nick Frost, so the next step was for the three boys in the gang to make a film together. Both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star Pegg and Frost, and both were co-written by Pegg and Wright, the director. The secret of Pegg's success? "I've been very lucky to meet people who have similar interests and goals to me," he says, simply. "I owe it entirely to them."

Since Monty Python, it's hard to think of another British comedy team which has written, directed and appeared in its own hit films. And yet Pegg's progress from drama school to stand-up to sketch show to sitcom to cinema seems remarkably orderly. He says not. "I wasn't thinking, 'I want to end up as a movie actor'," he insists. "That was always an appealing idea, but it always seemed so far away. And the reason I never saw Spaced or Big Train as a stepping stone is that I cared about them so much at that time. It was all about getting it done in the here and now."

The furrow-browed concentration which goes into Pegg's work is evident when you watch it. Spaced, a sitcom about a pop culture buff, made by pop culture buffs for pop culture buffs, was crammed with blink-and-you'll-miss-it homages to Pegg's favourite sci-fi and action movies. It repaid multiple viewings, hence it established a fan-base of pale, male devotees who would keep rewinding and freeze-framing until they'd spotted every detail that Pegg and co had so meticulously slotted in. There's nothing lackadaisical or random about his comedy.

"I think that's just because I'm anal," he says. "But no matter how tiny a joke is, there's someone out there who gets it. No matter how arcane the reference you make or the joke you tell, somebody will get it, and you have to aim everything you do at that one person. It always feels that much more gratifying as a spectator when you pick up on those things, too, not only because you feel good about yourself, but because you feel like you're being spoken to on a very personal level."

Pegg is quite serious about all this. He's courteous and affable, but there's no denying his earnestness. (The only gag he makes during our conversation is that he'd "love to do a film that was a dark drama... and where I had the power of flight".) He will reveal that he's married and lives in north London, but he's reluctant to talk about his personal life or his well-known pals. And while the character he'll play in How To Lose Friends doesn't mind what he does, just as long as he can rub shoulders with celebrities in America, Pegg himself wants to keep making films about "being British", and he's so focused on his work that he's almost embarrassed by fame's fringe benefits. Maybe that's why he's won friends and influenced people.

He didn't switch from TV to film because he wanted to be a superstar, he says. "There's a permanence to film which television doesn't have. I remember when we were doing Spaced, we worked our heart out on that show, we really really put everything into it, and then we'd get the ratings in and it would be, like, a million and a half, and we'd think, what's the fucking point? Television's so ephemeral, it's out and it's gone. That's why we decided to make a movie."

The irony of Pegg's big-screen ascendancy is that he hasn't tried to make broad, populist blockbusters. Like Spaced, his films are aimed specifically at viewers who study horror movies and cop movies as nerdily as he does. In short, they're films aimed at geeks. It just so happens that with superhero film franchises and TV series proliferating, and with people posting their own home-made versions of Star Wars and Goodfellas on YouTube, Pegg and his cohorts are bang on the zeitgeist. "I think the internet's got a hell of a lot to answer for," he says. "Geeks who used to think they were alone, or who only ever met up at conventions, they've suddenly found this platform where they can all communicate. It's the rise of the geek. And if you think about the film-makers now who are doing good work in Hollywood, they're all geeks. Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, Edgar... the majority of them have grown up just obsessing about films, and now they're getting to make films themselves. I think there might have been a typo in the Bible about the meek inheriting the earth." Maybe so. But Pegg, who's both meek and a geek, should qualify either way.

The DVD of 'Hot Fuzz' is out on 11 June

UK comedies the US has loved

The Pink Panther, 1963

Inspector Clouseau is a minor character in this swinging Sixties crime romp, but Peter Ustinov dropped out, Peter Sellers dropped in, and he was so funny that a long-running series was born. Several woeful attempts have been made to keep it going without him.

Life of Brian, 1979

A comedy with a plot, a love interest, and a consistent satirical standpoint, 'Life of Brian' isn't exactly characteristic of the Pythons, but John Cleese rates it as the work he'd like the group to be remembered for. Eric Idle is working on a stage musical adaptation.

Bean, 1997

Oddly, Mr Bean's first big-screen outing includes almost none of the virtually silent slapstick which the character is known for. That material was shot, but then edited out, turning Rowan Atkinson into a supporting actor in a film about a stressed Californian gallery curator.

Borat, 2006

Who knew that an indictment of America's bigotry and ignorance would go down so well in America? Sacha Baron Cohen's film made nearly $130m in the US, and, bizarrely for a semi-improvised film, it was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.