Simon Pegg has bravely opened up about his battle with depression and alcohol abuse in a brutally frank new interview.

Pegg, who has made no secret of his battles with his mental health in the past, opened up in a new interview with Empire magazine in regards to how difficult his situation has been: “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,” he said.

“The more material success presented itself to me, the less I could understand why it wasn’t fulfilling me in any way. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fulling me, it was because I was depressed. It’s not a mood. It’s a condition,” he continued:

“I just drank more heavily…Eventually I crashed out. At Comic-Con in 2010 — I’ve never told anyone this — we were promoting Paul and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere.”

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Pegg explained that it was the help of others that helped him turn his situation around and got him back on the right path: “I got well in 2010. I stopped drinking. I got a little bit of help. If you look at Burke & Hare, I’m bloated and fucking dead-eyed…I look at it now and think, “Fuck me, I was in a dark place then.” I was drunk a lot of the time and I was profoundly unhappy.

Pegg also revealed that it was his casting in the high-profile Mission Impossible series alongside Tom Cruise that offered him a sense of security he needed: “They took care of me and it helped me to get out of this dark place and realise that life was enjoyable. By the time I finished Ghost Protocol, I was better.”