Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – Simon Pegg Interview

Simon Pegg is a man at the top of his game. Following on from the release of Paul earlier this year, he now stars in not one but two Christmas blockbusters – Tintin, and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. In this fourth installment in the MI series, Pegg returns as Benji Dunn, who has graduated from his skilled technician in Mission Impossible III to full field agent. It gives the new film a welcome injection of humour – and there’s lots of it, with Pegg getting plenty of screen time up against the likes of Mr Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and bad guy Michael Nyquist (star of the Swedish Millennium trilogy).

We spoke with him face-to-face in his recent trip to Sydney for one of many MI:GP premieres that have seen him travel (literally) around the globe. We spoke with him just after we’d had a chat with his director, Brad Bird, who gave us a little bit of gold. You may not know that Brad, as well as being the director of The Incredibles, was also the voice of one of the characters, Edna Mode, fashionista of the superhero stars. She has terrible things to say about Simon Pegg’s style!

We also had a chat with Simon as part of a roundtable discussion, and we got the best bits from that (some of the questions from us, some from others) and you can read what Simon has to say about working on a mega-movie with a mega-star and a mega-director.

It was fun.

You’re a man who has made his own movies, but big-time Hollywood means big-time pressure – something you must be getting used to by now or do you? How much fear is involved in a film like this? How much leeway do you get to be who you are when you are doing the scenes that involve thousands of dollars a second?

SP: I think no fear really. I suppose some nerves, just because of the scale of what it is and it’s Tom and he’s the biggest movie star in the world. But the great thing about working with him is that he sets the bar and you have to match that, otherwise you’re not going to appear on the screen, you know you’ll disappear.

He is such a super professional its quite inspirational to work with him cause you think ‘I’m going to be like Tom Cruise, I’m going to really bring it’, and you know you have to, and you do. And also because of Brad Bird’s direction. We’re the first humans he’s worked with in a full capacity, and that as well as for Brad, was nice because it felt new for him also.

That was a very garbled answer.

There was some nerves but you‘ve got to get past that and bring 100% otherwise you’re going to look silly. I wanted to impress Tom Cruise.

Do you feel that’s coming along? Is he impressed yet?

SP: Yeah, he’s fine. I love Tom. It’s a great thing to penetrate that sort of awful noxious cloud of crap that surrounds him, that all these opinions people have that aren’t true.

Aside from being the biggest movie star on the world he’s just a regular guy and he’s a dad and he’s a really good guy to hang out with. We had such a laugh on this film, the four of us, a lot of the time just giggling. Its great to meet someone like Tom and just seeing him being a normal human being, which is what he is.

Everyone else seems to be constantly running, fighting, being thrown off buildings, going through dust storms and the largest injury you got was a paper cut. Did you feel guilty about that?

SP: No, because I actually trained just as hard as everyone for the film. I did Taekwondo and weapons training – it was a great way to lose weight and get paid. When I started, I came through a bit doughy and I ended up completely ripped even though I didn’t need to employ much of that in the film.

There is a scene in the film where I run down some metal stairs really fast and I had to do it something like fourteen times and when they got the film to the lab, they dropped the canister and exposed it and I had to do it all again – I couldn’t walk the next day because my quads were so stretched, so I think I suffered as much as they did just by running down some stairs.

So Renner and his rubbish stunt and Tom hanging off a building, anyone can do that. Run down some stairs, run down the building from the inside – that’s hard…

Your character of Benji Dunn really gets an upgrade in his second Mission: Impossible outing.

JJ Abrahams and I had always joked that if we did another Mission: Impossible then maybe Benii would come back and be slightly more involved in the day-to-day of the IMF.

We always had this idea that once he’d helped Ethan Hunt save his wife’s life in the third and been his personal GPS tracker and helped him get through Shanghai and he sat back down at his desk in his lab and he thought ‘Oh f*ck this, I want to do something more exciting’ and applied to be a field agent and so when the fourth one came about I immediately got an email from JJ saying Benji passed the exam and he’s going to be out in the field.

It was a chance to reprise the role and to work with JJ and Tom again, which I really wanted to do. It was a no brainer. I never do anything just for the sake of it, I always choose very carefully who I work with and what I do.

I love JJ, I trust him very much and the idea that Brad was going to direct it was just mind-blowing to me because I am a huge fan of his, I think The Incredibles is an incredible film. Iron Giant is a deeply underrated masterpiece of a film and of course Rattatouille. All three films he’s never not hit it out of the park.

The notion of him doing Mission: Impossible was just too good to turn down.