If someone told you, back in the days of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, that Simon Pegg would a) become a part of the Mission: Impossible series and b) make pals with Tom Cruise, you might not have believed them. And yet both have come true. Pegg joined the series over a decade-and-a-half ago, with Mission: Impossible III. But what do the British comedy legend and the guy who saved movies talk about? And what don’t talk about?
For one thing, they don’t avoid discussing him being the biggest actor on the planet. “We joke about it. I mean, I always make fun of him for it, you know, about the things that he can access,” Pegg said during an appearance on BBC’s Desert Island Discs (as caught by Deadline). He added that Cruise “kind of appreciates the ridiculousness of it sometimes.”
Pegg describes they’re friendship as “just very simple and amiable,” adding, “It’s always been a very easy relationship. I think you realise, when you meet the person rather than the thicket of mythology that’s built up around them, it’s a different experience. I mean, he loves [the fame] and he really relishes it, it’s all he knows. It energises him and spurs him on.”
There is something Pegg won’t bring up with him though: Cruise’s scientology. Discussing that aspect of his life, Pegg says, would “abuse my privileged access that I get to him.”
During the radio appearance, Pegg also discussed his struggles with alcohol. He went to rehab shortly before filming the fourth Mission: Impossible, but while shooting the third — after suffering a mental health episode — he found himself hiding his addiction from others on-set.
“You become very sneaky when you have something like that in your life,” Pegg recalled. “You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped. But eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive.”
The probably super-long Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One will be released on July 12. It will likely not feature Pegg doing crazy stunts, but who knows.
(Via Deadline)
Source: https://uproxx.com/movies/simon-pegg-friendship-tom-cruise/
