Simon Pegg/Star Trek/Paramount Generic/by Jeff DawsonIs there any phrase more quoted from TV science fiction than “Beam me up, Scotty”? — that ritual emergency issued to the Chief Engineer of the Starship Enterprise whenever Kirk and the boys got into a spot of bother. Simon Pegg laughs. “It’s one of those phrases that’s never actually been said[ital] in Star Trek,” he informs. “It’s one of those weird apocryphal things that’s entered into common parlance.” Still, for someone who grew up watching the original Star Trek series in the early 70s, what an honour it is, he declares, to be filling the size nines of the late James Doohan in the brand new cinematic outing. It was Doohan, of course, who played the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer, one Montgomery Scott.
Sadly Doohan died before the new film went into production, so Pegg never got to meet him. Though Doohan’s actor son Chris, who appears in the movie, was on-hand for information. “Chris was my kind of foil in the transporter room,” says Pegg. “We were able to talk about his father and I got a sense of who James was and what he was like as a man.” Doohan, a former journeyman actor, a combat veteran of World War Two, can barely have suspected that his audition for a part in a no-frills television series would go on to make him a pop culture immortal — so much so that after the venerable Canadian thesp passed away in 2005, aged 85, he had his ashes blasted into space. There were technical hitches that meant it took longer than anticipated. “But he’s up there now,” Pegg smiles.
Needless to say, Paramount’s spanking, big-budget Star Trek film — a real blockbuster extravaganza if ever there was one — is much anticipated as one of the[ital] event films of 2009. Helmed by JJ Abrams, perhaps best known, among numerous film and television credits, as the creator of Lost, the movie is a wham-bam thrill-ride, an affectionate, sometimes playfully irreverent prequel to the original 1966 show — one, people tend to forget, that was cancelled after just three seasons, only achieving a new lease of life when it went into international syndication a few years later. But the rest is entertainment history. Thus was spawned a 1979 film — Star Trek: The Motion Picture — which begat a whole series of movies, which continually evolved as the TV show was reinvented first as Star Trek: The Next Generation and, later, as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.
Eschewing the current, and rather tedious, vogue for exploring the “dark side” of how an action franchise came to be, it’s a refreshingly joyous affair. “Absolutely. Without being 'lite’ light,” assures Pegg. “It’s not fluffy. I think the good thing about it is it completely captures the spirit of the original but with the added bonus of being able to render it in really impressive visuals, which is what they never had in the old days.” Perversely, it was the limitations of the special effects which made the original show so enduring. “It’s quite cerebral,” adds Pegg. “It was actually a fairly challenging show at a time when a lot of the other science fiction was crazy throwaway: Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants.”
This time round, we see how a young Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura came to graduate from Starfleet Academy and sign up for their fabled five-year mission to seek out new worlds, new civilisations. Though we don’t encounter Scott until a little further down the line, as a lone engineer, tinkering in his lab on a remote planet, having been exiled there after an earlier mishap with his trials in teleportation. “Scotty is very sure about his theory to beam something onboard a moving object,” explains Pegg. “So sure that he experiments on the admiral’s prize dog and it disappears.”
But where would the genre of science fiction be without a little time travel? After a visit by Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Scott is prompted to reboot his testing, which will yield a key development in thwarting an impending attack by the Romulans. To this end Scott is aided (if you can follow) by a futuristic, older Mr Spock, who has zipped back in time to give Scott a little tuition. It has been a poorly kept secret, unlike everything else surrounding the production, that it is the great Leonard Nimoy who returns in his iconic role “He’s a remarkable man and it was amazing to work with him because I’ve known him as an actor and that character since I was very small,” says Pegg. “And to suddenly be in a situation where he’s being Spock and I’m reacting to that is quite bizarre.”
These are interesting times for Pegg. Not so long ago, the actor-comedian from Gloucester in England’s rural West Country, had seemed just another budding comic in his TV series Spaced. Then, via two quirky, cult films — Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz — he established himself as one of Britain’s hottest acting properties, whose everyman appeal was showcased, most recently, in How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, where he played the lone British journalist at a pretentious New York, Vanity Fair-style magazine. Hollywood had been taking note. A small and unlikely part in Mission Impossible III, brought Pegg within the scope of its director, JJ Abrams. And thus follows Star Trek.
Though Pegg has another small comedy in the works — “A road movie about two geeks and an alien”— he will next be seen in the Steven Spielberg-produced, computerised, The Adventures Of Tintin, in which he and regular actor/writer sidekick Nick Frost play bumbling detective duo, The Thompson Twins. “When Steven Spielberg asks you to go and meet him, you just go[ital],” says Pegg. “People are often surprised that I’m still in awe of it all. Why? Because ET, Jaws and Close Encounters were films that had a marked effect on me as a child. Nick and I had a conversation with him about Close Encounters and we left and just jumped around in the corridor for two minutes because we’d just spoken to a hero of ours.” Dare one mention that, in his new social circles, Pegg is the godfather to Apple, daughter of London neighbours Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as big pals with David Schwimmer with whom he worked on The Big Nothing and Run Fatboy, Run.
Actually, the amiable Pegg, 39, seems pretty down to earth, if famously private about his domestic affairs, one of the reasons, he says, he’s such a keen internet blogger. “It’s just a great way to put the record straight every time.” Though we do know that his Scottish wife, Maureen, has been very influential when it comes to Star Trek, being the model for the Caledonian accent Pegg has had to carry through the picture, specifically “Maryhill in Glasgow,” he quips.
Pegg was perhaps a natural for Star Trek all along. A known sci-fi fan (he has also appeared in Doctor Who), while studying at Bristol University he had penned a thesis on “The Marxist Overview of Seventies Cinema and Hegemonic Discourses,” he recounts. “Which was enormous fun to do. People go, ‘It’s silly to analyse things like that,’ but it really isn’t.” His chief example of the American Way writ large on the silver screen was Star Wars. Though one can argue Star Trek as a case in point, too – an American ship, named “Enterprise”, set on exacting regime-change upon galactic evildoers…
“Well it was supposed to be like Wagon Train in space, that was the pitch for it, frontiersmanship,” says Pegg, “but the other thing Star Trek did, which was completely radical, was it united a multi-ethnic cast. At a time, not that long after World War Two, and at a very tense time in the Cold War, there was a Russian navigator and a Japanese pilot, and you had a black communications officer, and the first ever interracial kiss (between Kirk and Uhura, a landmark TV moment). It’s easy to forget how utopian the vision of Star Trek was, which is why it is so beloved by people who maybe don’t fit in, because maybe there’s a universe where they would.”
Some of those people can be a little — ahem[ital] — zealous. We’re talking about those diehard fans, the Trekkies. “And Trekkers[ital], who are a different category,” says Pegg. “There are factions within that fanbase.” They have not been unanimous in their approval of the new film. “I think to fold your arms against it like a few of the more militantly purist ones have is kind of self-defeating,” Pegg muses. “You get stuff on the internet where people are dead against it because somehow it’s sacrilegious. Although I get that it’s precious to them. When I got cast as Scotty there were a few dissenting voices about my comedy background. I completely understand that.”
What with their conventions, their penchant for dressing up and their ability to order half a shandy in Klingon, it brings us into that world lampooned so marvellously in that arch Star Trek send-up, Galaxy Quest. “I watched it in my trailer on set,” Pegg sniggers. But, he stresses, generally the goodwill has been enormous. And we shouldn’t stereotype the fans either. “It’s easy to be cynical about people that are enthusiastic about stuff… ‘yeah they live with their mums’… All it is is being unashamedly and unabashedly in awe of something and enjoying it. That’s just the way it is. And I just love that.”
“I think what the filmmakers have really nailed is there is stuff in there that acknowledges and speaks very privately to the faithful and yet you can watch it, if you’ve never even heard of Star Trek, and it will be an absolutely rip-roaring, very engaging adventure about human beings in space, together with their alien counterparts,” he urges. “This is a way for Star Trek to start again and for us to see the further adventures of characters that were made so classic.”
