Nick Frost’s “most stressful” performance didn’t even involve being onscreen
There aren’t many famous actors who got their start in training videos for the electrical retailer Dixons. In fact, I’m willing to wager that Nick Frost is the only one.
From his early days on British TV to his legendary partnership with Simon Pegg to his upcoming gig as Hagrid in the Harry Potter TV show, Frost has amassed an incredibly impressive CV. He can also sell you a washing machine like nobody’s business.
In 2011, Frost took on arguably his most high-profile performance to date, lending his voice to the animated adventure movie The Adventures of Tintin, which was given the subtitle The Secret of the Unicorn in some territories, featuring an all-star cast including Jamie Bell as the titular journalist, Andy Serkis as his seafaring alcoholic sidekick Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig as the nefarious Mr Sakharine, but the real heavyweights were behind the scenes.
The movie was co-written by the all-British dream team of Joe Cornish, Steven Moffat, and Frost’s old pal Edgar Wright. The production team was made up of Kathleen Kennedy, who would go on to become President of Lucasfilm, Peter Jackson, the titanic force behind The Lord of the Rings franchise, and the director of the project, Steven Spielberg.
As Frost relayed to The Guardian, he found this a little overwhelming. “I need a week to really get a scene into my head,” he said, “You’ve got Steven Spielberg and Kathy Kennedy, who’s the most powerful woman in Hollywood, and Peter Jackson, who’s co-directing from New Zealand using iChat! It was the most stressful thing I’ve ever done. Having said that, Spielberg was amazing. Sometimes he’d run on at the end of a scene and do a little dance and punch the air.”
Frost and Pegg were cast as Thomson and Thompson (the spelling matters a lot), a pairing of bumbling British detectives who often assist Tintin in his investigations. The pair are an essential part of Hergé’s famous graphic novels, which depict the red-headed sleuth and his friends going around the world solving crimes and catching baddies.
The duo were the perfect choice for the bowler hat-wearing lawmen, as the entire gag surrounding Thomson and Thompson is that they look identical, but aren’t related, and Pegg and Frost know each other inside out. They’re brothers in all but blood, and they gave a great performance.
Sadly, this would be the only chance they would get to play the cumbersome couple. The film was a hit at the box office and received strong reviews, even winning the Golden Globe for ‘Best Animated Feature Film’, yet a sequel has never materialised. The film has been in development hell for years, with both Spielberg and Jackson failing many times to make it happen, and while Serkis announced that Jackson was still working on a follow-up as recently as 2024, it might be time to let this one go.
While it might not have spawned a franchise, The Adventures of Tintin gave Frost a huge platform and the chance to work with some true icons, even if they did make him feel a little unsettled.
