Simon Pegg is geek royalty. He’s established himself in the genre comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and is also part of the resurrected Star Trek team. Now Pegg is speaking out about his battles with alcoholism and depression, and how being in a Mission: Impossible movie helped straighten him out.
*As Pegg told Esquire, after he became successful, “I was depressed. I had always been susceptible to it. But at the same time as I started to ascend into what would conventionally be regarded as a success, I was going down.”
*Pegg added, “The more material success presented itself to me, the less I could understand it wasn’t fulfilling me in any way. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fulfilling me, it was because I was depressed. It’s not a mood. It’s a condition.”
*Pegg says his drinking was evident in some of his movies, including the black comedy Burke & Hare. “If you look at Burke & Hare, I’m bloated and f*cking dead-eyed…I look at it now and think, ‘F*ck me, I was in a dark place then.’ I was drunk a lot of the time and I was profoundly unhappy.”
*Pegg says he finally got well after disappearing at geek heaven, aka Comic Con. “I’ve never told anyone this – we were promoting a movie and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere.”
*Pegg also told Empire that he got a lot of help one of the kings of genre culture, wunderkind J.J. Abrams, as well as Tom Cruise when they were working on Mission: Impossible. “They took care of me and it helped me to get out of this dark place and realize that life was enjoyable. By the time I finished Ghost Protocol, I was better. J.J.’s unending faith in me makes me teary to think about it. He’s always stuck by me.”
