From Spaced to Star Trek by way of Star Wars, Simon Pegg has become Hollywood’s hottest geek. He tells Carole Cadwalladr where it all went interstellar

I have interviewed Simon Pegg once before, nine years ago, and he told me the story about how he’d been asked if he was going to carry on making films in Britain: “And I said: ‘Well, I’m not about to go and star in Mission: Impossible III.’” At which point he was asked to star in Mission: Impossible III. “I pulled the film name off the top of my head. And six months later I was, like: ‘Hi Tom!’”

That was your first taste of Hollywood, I remind him. And now look at you… you’re not just in the belly of the beast, you are the beast.

“I know. It’s terrible! I have become the very thing I feared.”

It’s not terrible, though. It’s what massive success looks like. He’s become Hollywood’s go-to geek. The ordinary guy who gets dropped into some of the biggest movie franchises on the planet to play the Everydude. The bloke next door, often with a science degree, who acts as the foil to the hero – most notably Benji Dunn in three outings of Mission: Impossible and Scotty in two Star Treks.

It’s usually the way he’s portrayed in the press, too. The ordinary bloke who co-wrote and appeared in cult sitcom Spaced – in which he lived in a dingy flatshare and spent his spare time playing video games, a scenario roughly based on his life – and then got parachuted on to Tom Cruise’s private jet and became best friends with Hollywood director JJ Abrams and Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

People seem to think that you actually were living in a dingy flatshare and won a reality TV show, I say.

“Well, that comes from not having chiseled good looks,” he says. “It’s a modern phenomenon, the ordinary person at the centre of an extraordinary situation. It came out of Diehard, in a way. I think John McTiernan [the director of Diehard] was the progenitor of the fallible geek hero. It was what happened after the preternatural Arnie Schwarzenegger masculinity thing – the bespectacled hero who was still managing to have relationships with gorgeous women. And after Bruce Willis came your Seth Rogens and Paul Rudds and me.”

JJ Abrams and I went for dinner and he offered me a role in Star Wars: a creature that looks like a blobfish

This is a very classic Simon Pegg answer. He studied TV and film at Bristol University, and analysing movies is still one of his great loves. He just gets to star in them, too, these days. And in the case of the latest – Star Trek Beyond, out this month – co-write it. Also he really does hang out on Tom Cruise’s private jet, and JJ Abrams and Chris Martin are both close friends.

But if he’s changed at all in the decade since I last interviewed him, the only visible sign is that he’s more relaxed. Last time he would barely even confirm or deny his wife’s name (Maureen – they met on a transfer bus in Greece more than a decade ago and now have a daughter, Matilda). It might just be that he’s a good actor – this is not a given: most of them aren’t, at least not in an interview situation – but he seems to actually enjoy engaging with the questions. But then nerding out on film and geek culture for an hour is probably less of an arduous task for him than it is for many people.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Even if you wear a hat and glasses, you walk into a shop, then people stop’: with wife Maureen McCann. Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images

You are mass entertainment now, I say, the thing you spent your degree course decoding and picking apart. You are the dominant discourse.

“I know! It’s strange,” he says. “I mean, when you’re aware that what you’re creating is in some way influencing things – as is all art, if you want to call entertainment art, which isn’t necessarily the case… Entertainment is an overrated function of art. That’s the great quote I took away from university with me. But I guess when you know you’re wielding a means of actually saying something or sneaking something into that entertainment, you try your best to make it meaningful.”

Is that what you’ve tried to do with Star Trek?

“It was actually a very challenging idea when it first appeared. You look at the way the world was in 1966, and yet you have a Japanese helmsman. Later you get a Russian navigator. You have a black woman in a position of authority. You have Kirk and Uhura having the first interracial kiss on TV.”

Star Trek Beyond, the latest outing, is the 50th anniversary of the franchise, and writing it felt like a “terrifying responsibility”, he says, “whether it comes across as keenly as we wanted it with all the whiz-bangs of a big science-fiction movie, but what we wanted to do was to question the idea of the original vision of it. Gene Roddenberry’s original idea of the Federation was like a UN in space. We wanted to ask whether it was a good thing or more like a colonising force.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise filming Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

So you’ve written a post-colonial, structuralist critique of the original Star Trek?

“That’s exactly what it is!”

Every night before he went to bed, he would kiss his poster of Carrie Fisher good night

It’s worth being reminded that Pegg didn’t actually get plucked from bedsit obscurity and get sent to Hollywood as a prize. Though much of what has happened has been down to his friendship with JJ Abrams. Abrams is one of the most influential directors in Hollywood as the man behind the relaunched Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. He saw Pegg’s 2004 film Shaun of the Dead, a zombie comedy filled with knowing references to other horror films, and loved it.

“I was blown away by Simon’s sense of humour but also by his acting skills,” he has said. Abrams cast him in Mission: Impossible III “because selfishly I wanted to meet the guy”.

They’re both still avid students of popular culture. Pegg describes their friendship as based on: “An obsession and an obsessive compulsion to indulge in certain kinds of cinema and television.” And, most crucially for Pegg at least, they both shared a boyhood passion for Star Wars.

In his autobiography Pegg writes about how Star Wars was one of the defining moments of his childhood. It “fired my imagination, increased my vocabulary, encouraged my interest in film production and music”. Every night before he went to bed, he would kiss his poster of Carrie Fisher good night.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Star Trek director J J Abrams. Photograph: Startraks Photo/REX/Shutterstock

It’s hard not to wonder about the connection between the film and his personal life. From his autobiography it’s clear that he saw Star Wars and was entranced by it at more or less exactly the same moment his parents divorced. Was there an element of escapism to your love of it, do you think?

“I don’t know. Maybe subconsciously. I don’t remember it being a particularly traumatic time. I remember just going into my mum and saying: ‘Where’s Dad?’ I didn’t have a great relationship with my stepfather – the one thing me and him bonded on was sci-fi. I guess we, all of us, take refuge in fantasyland even if it’s not from anything specific.”

When Abrams landed the franchise, “We went out for dinner and he offered me the role of this creature that looks like a blobfish.” He leapt at it. “I was in Abu Dhabi in this big rubber suit, sweating my arse off, just thinking: ‘This is brilliant!’ It was so great and extraordinary to be in that movie.”

It felt like his “moment of manifest destiny”, Pegg said in an interview last year. That’s a pretty hard act to follow, I say. And he doesn’t disagree. “I had a bit of a crisis of confidence afterwards. I hadn’t had the chance to take stock, and I came home to the UK and I was pretty sure I wanted to quit acting. I called my agent and I said – this is an absolutely true story, and ridiculous if a little name-droppy – but I said: ‘Look, I want to take some time off and think about what I want to do next.’ I was being a bit dramatic. I said: ‘Don’t call me for the next six months, unless like, Steven Spielberg calls.’ Then, of course, my phone rang.”

It was Spielberg offering him a part in his new sci-fi blockbuster, Ready Player One, another dream come true. “He’s someone who’s influenced me my whole life, my love of film and my love of the craft.” The film is based on the young adult novel by Ernest Cline which is set in 2045, but both Pegg and Spielberg are referenced in it. “In one scene there’s the line: ‘Let’s go home and watch Spaced. Let’s have a Spaced marathon.’ I always felt flattered that anyone would consider that Spaced would exist in America in 2045.”

These big movies are enormous fun, but I want to get back to doing small things

It’s all pretty meta. And while it’s the sort of thing Pegg revels in, recently he has bridled at some of the limitations of the geeky world that he’s a poster boy for. He got into hot water with fans last month by claiming that sci-fi culture has contributed to the “infantilisation of society. There are things going on that people should be upset about: slave brides and God knows what. Yet there seems to be louder complaints about the fact that Batman shot somebody. People love to get offended by anything. There are so many virtual pitchforks online… The internet democratises disgruntlement in such a way where, ordinarily, people would just keep that shit to themselves, but now they can find others who are similarly bitter and want to share.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that he’s given up Twitter. What was your breaking point?

“Five million followers.”

What, you hit five million and thought: “Enough’s enough”?

“I felt I’d given the world my phone number. I’d read the replies and it was people talking to you as if they knew you. Twitter is a narcissist’s help centre. People generate their own celebrity on it and then they buy into it. They drink the Kool-Aid of their follower numbers. Lots and lots of people would be lovely and it would give you this little buzz of validation. And then someone says something mean, and you’re like: ‘Fuck you!’ But why choose between the two?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arrested development: with Nick Frost in 2007’s Hot Fuzz. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

It seems to be all part of a certain self-consciousness that has gone hand in hand with his success. He moved out of London a few years ago with his wife and young daughter because “even if you wear a hat and glasses, you walk into a shop, then people stop”. People are only ever friendly and nice, he says, “but I’ve put myself in a position where I feel exposed. If I live on a street where there’s only cows, I’m more comfortable.”

And for all the blockbusters and franchises and realisations of childhood dreams, he’s thinking about what he wants to do next. “These big movies are enormous fun and I really enjoy doing them, but I want to get back to doing small things. I’d like to spend maybe a year with a script and direct it and edit it.”

It sounds like he’s going back to his roots. Where he was a decade ago when I met him promoting Hot Fuzz, a spoof murder thriller that he wrote with Edgar Wright and co-starred his friend Nick Frost. “Nick and I have plans that we’re actually moving forward now with something that is bigger than anything we’ve done before. Well, it’s not really a film, it’s a collaboration…”

Is he out in the country with you and cows?

“No, he’s somewhere in southwest London. I’d better not say where in case the Frostitutes hunt him down.”

The Frostitutes?

“They’re his fans. They’re very tenacious.”

I feel a bit responsible, I say, because the last time I interviewed you I emailed a comedy writer friend and he told me the story of how you and Nick Frost used to share a single bed that was repeated in every feature from then on.

“Was that you?” he says, unbothered. “The thing is, anything you say these days gets reduced to a clickbait headline. You’re misquoted, and when you clarify you’re accused of backtracking. I got into trouble with the Star Wars community for apparently saying I didn’t respect anyone that likes Star Wars prequels, which wasn’t what I said or meant. I couldn’t be bothered to engage with it, because… just why the fuck should I?”

Yes. Why the fuck should he? He’s a bit punchier than he was nine years ago. A bit less apologetic. Less Spaced. More Star Wars. And why not? He’s earned it. May the force be with him.

Star Trek Beyond is in cinemas from 22 July