Out in the movieverse there are three kinds of trilogy. There are planned trilogies like Park Chan-wook's Vengeance sequence. There are phoney-baloney retro-fitted trilogies like Baz Lurhmann's Red Curtain films. And then there are surprise trilogies; these may also be retro-fitted – it's a defining feature, in fact – but they're more like happy accidents than ad hoc marketing ploys. We didn't expect them or save up for their college fees but we're delighted to have them around.
In keeping with this organic theme nobody mapped out the Cornetto Trilogy aka the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy aka the Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy: "We just ended up with a Cornetto in the second one and had to keep on going," shrugs star Simon Pegg.
And so we welcome The World's End, the mint-flavoured full-stop in a series of frozen treats that have previously stretched to strawberry and original blue.
The films do not – in generic or narrative terms – form a regular trilogy shape. As director Edgar Wright points out, the movies are neither sequential nor similar. Instead each instalment boasts a unique set of characters and unfolds in its own little corner of England’s green and pleasant land. Each movie arrives replete with its own set of fun fan-boy references and features all new material.
“We make the movies we want to see,” says Pegg. “We can only really be true to ourselves and we can’t ever sit on our laurels and assume that if one small, edgy comedy hit then they all will. We’ve always thought ‘let’s do something a bit different here.’”
Still, watching Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and now The World's End – all films written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and Nick Frost – one can't help but feel that this is trilogy territory, just not as we know it.
“They’re all set in the present day and they’re all set in England,” suggests Pegg. “The next thing we make may not have any of those things. It might be set in Spain in 1942.”
That's possible, of course. But it does seem rather unlikely. That's not to say the lads lack range. Between them, the triumvirate behind cult TV sensation Spaced, have scored extraordinary and varied successes, individually and collectively.
On his lonesome, Pegg has popped up in two Star Trek movies, two Mission Impossible films and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Wright has cracked Hollywood with Scott Pilgrim versus The World and turned heads with two former celebrity girlfriends, Anna Kendrick and Ash's Charlotte Hatherley. Marvel's Ant-Man beckons. Frost is currently shooting the dance flick, Cuban Fury, and has taken prominent roles in Snow White and the Huntsman, Attack the Block and Ice Age: Continental Drift.
As a bicephalic entity, Pegg and Frost have written and starred in the extra-terrestrial comedy Paul and have appeared as Thompson and Thompson in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.
There is, nonetheless, a recognisable alchemy in the Cornetto pictures.
When the chaps get together with their old mucker Mr Wright, many of their best japes come from the juxtaposition of genre tropes and common garden Britishness. Shaun parachuted zombies into the suburbs. Fuzz transplanted a city super-cop to an English countryside defined by evil ancient custom and curtain twitching. The World's End stages an alien invasion in a sleepy satellite town.
Their new picture isn't as defined by movie references as its predecessors: "It's more about the books of John Wyndham and Samuel Youd the science fiction literature of that period," suggests Wright. There's something different about the characterisation too. The World's End pivots around failed recovering alcoholic Gary King (Pegg). Once the coolest kid in sixth form, now a sad sack who recites Primal Scream lyrics, Gary rounds up his schoolyard chums for a repeat of the pub crawl they failed to complete twenty years earlier.
“Everybody knows a Gary King,” notes Pegg, as he and Frost sit down on the Dublin stop of a two-month publicity tour. “Either that or they are a Gary King.”
“I couldn’t stand that he has a giant blackhead in his ear,” adds Frost. “I can’t look at him without wanting to get at it.”
Gary’s long lost friends – including Frost’s short-fused corporate suit, Andy, a love-struck Paddy Considine, pliable Eddie Marsdan and distracted Martin Freeman – are hoping to make their excuses and leave when they notice that all is not well with their sleepy hometown. Can they work together to fend off invaders while still managing to knock the pints back? Or will Gary prove too damned annoying and immature?
Pegg and Frost are, I note, playing the least likeable parts of their career. Gary is an intolerable dick, right?
"Yeah," nods Pegg. "I mean Shaun was a dick and Nick Angel was a dick in Hot Fuzz in their own ways. But I liked playing Gary more than either of those characters. He is a dick but there's more to it. He's a shell masking a tragedy. He's stuck in his teens because he can't go anywhere else."
“And I liked playing Andy because he sees through all the bullshit,” adds Frost. “He questions everything.”
Frost and Pegg have, over the past decade, acquired celebrity chums – Pegg is godfather to Gwyneth and Chris' daughter Apple – and film-making fans like John Landis (who directed Pegg in Burke and Hare and gets name checked in The World's End). In person, however, they haven't changed since I first met them for Shaun of the Dead. Though seldom idle as writers or actors, they make time for one another on a daily basis. They didn't become the planet's most appealing onscreen-offscreen bromance without good cause.
“We used to share a bedroom and then we shared a flat and then we shared a house,” says Pegg. “And after we got married we perfected talking rubbish to each other on the phone. If we’re not talking we text each other every day - sometimes 25 times a day. My wife Maureen knows by my laugh when it’s Nick on the phone.”
“And my wife will ask ‘Was that Simon? How is he?’” adds Frost. “And I won’t know. We don’t talk about anything. We only talk shit.”
“My wife will ask what we were talking about and I really don’t know,” nods Pegg. “We speak a weird little language about nothing at all.”
Do they remember meeting for the first time? “Yeah. It was almost 20 years ago – this year I think – at a friend’s party,” recalls Simon. “Nick was introduced to me because he was interested in getting into stand up. And then he came to see me and I was terrible.”
“You were alright,” interjects Frost. “You weren’t meant to be on that night”.
“Oh yeah. I wasn’t meant to be on. And I felt really embarrassed because I was supposed to be the guy that was going to help you get into comedy and I was sure you were thinking ‘This guy is rubbish’. I always thought you thought that. Until now.”
It hardly needs to be said that projects cooked up between Frost, Pegg and Wright benefit from the crew’s shorthand and longstanding friendships.
“It’s important that a film isn’t just about us,” says Frost. “If a focus puller or make up girl isn’t having a good time on set that’s no good either. But I don’t think our films could happen any other way. Really good friends don’t end up together in a kitchen saying ‘How’s your mum?’ or ‘What you been up to?’ Really good friends just know all that stuff.”
“And it never feels like we’re away from each other even when we are,” says Pegg.
"It feels like we stopped making Hot Fuzz on the Friday," nods Frost. "And then we started making The World's End on the Monday."
yyy The World's End opens July 19th
