“It was just bizarre”: the Texas gas station that convinced Simon Pegg he was famous
There has been a long tradition of British actors becoming famous in America. There’s something about their pale skin and funny voices that Americans just can’t resist, and in recent years, one of the biggest benefactors of this trend has been Simon Pegg.
A massive star on both sides of the pond, the Gloucestershire-born star has become a regular fixture of some of the biggest franchises in the world. For anyone who knew him before his rise to the top, this must feel slightly surreal.
Pegg established himself in the UK as a comedy actor and can be spotted in a number of 1990s sketch shows and sitcoms, including cult favourite I’m Alan Partridge. His real big break came through the show Spaced, in which he plays a hapless young man cohabiting with fellow wastrel Jessica Hynes (then known as Jessica Stevenson). This is also where he first linked up with Nick Frost and Edgar Wright
According to an interview with GQ, it was this three-way relationship that helped Pegg realise he had cracked the US market. He recalled a trip he took to the States in 2007 that brought home just how far he’d come since his days jobbing on BBC Two.
“We were in a place called Rachel, Nevada, which has a population of 99,” he explained, “It’s basically some trailers and a diner. We walked in there, and they go: ‘Hey, Shaun of the Dead!’ And we walked into a gas station in Waco, Texas, in the middle of a rainstorm, and it was: ‘Hey, Shaun of the Dead!’ It was just bizarre.”
In case you need reminding (which you almost certainly don’t), Shaun of the Dead is the first of three collaborations between Pegg, Frost, and Wright that make up the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which made a huge splash in the UK but impressively did even better in North America.
It cracked the top ten of the US-Canada box office charts and stayed there for three weeks, which is remarkable for a movie that feels incredibly British, remaining a cult favourite in multiple countries to this day.
Shaun of the Dead opened a ton of new doors for Pegg, who, just two years after his trip to The Winchester, landed the role of tech expert Benji Dunn in Mission: Impossible III. This would turn into a regular gig, as he would return to the character five more times over the next two decades, and then the next film in the trilogy, Hot Fuzz, cemented his status as an international draw. That movie was so successful in the US that distributors Rogue Pictures were forced to screen it in over 400 new cinemas in order to meet demand.
A lot of time and effort is spent researching which films will be successful in which markets, but nobody could have predicted that a small horror-comedy set entirely within London could have made such a big impression. Simon Pegg owes a lot to Shaun of the Dead, even if he is sick to the back teeth of everyone begging him for a sequel.
