page_title: Simon Pegg
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Simon Pegg / Career
caption_attribution_description: Simon Pegg at a Star Trek premiere in London.
context_page_description: Simon John Pegg is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. He came to public prominence in the UK as the co-creator of the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, directed by Edgar Wright. He went on to co-write and star in the Three Flavours Cornetto film trilogy: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End. He and Nick Frost wrote and starred in the sci-fi film Paul.
  Pegg is one of the few performers to have achieved what Radio Times calls "the Holy Grail of nerd-dom", playing popular supporting characters in Doctor Who, Star Trek as Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He currently stars as Benji Dunn in the Mission: Impossible film series, and the Chamberlain in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
context_section_description: Pegg's early appearances in TV series and films include Six Pairs of Pants (Meridian & Anglia, 1995),  Asylum, Faith in the Future, Big Train and Hippies. Between 1998 and 2004, Pegg was regularly featured on BBC Radio 4's The 99p Challenge. Pegg's other credits include appearances in the World War II mini-series Band of Brothers; the television comedies Black Books, Brass Eye and I'm Alan Partridge; and the films The Parole Officer, 24 Hour Party People, and Guest House Paradiso. He played various roles during the tour of Steve Coogan's 1998 live stage show The Man Who Thinks He's It.
  In 1999, he created and co-wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced with Jessica Stevenson. The series was directed by Edgar Wright, with whom Pegg and Stevenson had previously worked on Asylum, and Pegg wrote the character of Mike Watt specifically for his friend Nick Frost. For his performance in this series, Pegg was nominated for a British Comedy Award as Best Male Comedy Newcomer. The experience of making a Spaced fantasy sequence featuring zombies led to Pegg and Wright co-writing the "romantic zombie comedy" film Shaun of the Dead, released in April 2004, in which Pegg also starred. At George A. Romero's invitation, Pegg and Wright made cameo appearances in Romero's zombie film, Land of the Dead. In 2004, Pegg starred in a spin-off of the television show Danger! 50,000 Volts! called Danger! 50,000 Zombies!, in which he played a zombie hunter named Dr. Fell.
  He played mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, the Strontium Dog, in a series of Big Finish Productions audio plays based on the character from British comic 2000 AD. Pegg also appeared in Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who audio story Invaders From Mars as Don Chaney, and appeared in the Doctor Who television series, playing the Editor in the 2005 episode "The Long Game". He also narrated the first series of the "making-of" documentary series Doctor Who Confidential.
  Upon completion of Shaun of the Dead, Pegg was questioned as to whether he would be abandoning the British film industry for Hollywood, and he replied, "It's not like we're going to go away and do, I don't know, Mission: Impossible III", picking the title of an imaginary blockbuster. When the film Mission: Impossible III was subsequently made, Pegg appeared in it as Benji Dunn, an IMF technician who assists Tom Cruise's character Ethan Hunt. He reprised the role in three further Mission Impossible sequel films: Ghost Protocol (2011), Rogue Nation (2015), and Fallout (2018).
  In 2006, he played Gus in Big Nothing alongside David Schwimmer. The same year, Pegg and Wright completed their second film, Hot Fuzz, released in February 2007. The film is a police-action movie homage and also stars Nick Frost, in which Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a London policeman transferred to rural Sandford, a fictional village where grisly events take place. In 2007, Pegg starred in The Good Night (directed by Jake Paltrow) and Run Fatboy Run directed by David Schwimmer and co-starring Thandie Newton and Hank Azaria. In 2008, he wrote the dialogue for an English language re-release of the cult 2006 animated Norwegian film, Free Jimmy. Pegg received screenwriting credit for this, and also voiced one of the main characters in the English-language version, which has an international range of actors including Woody Harrelson.
  Pegg co-wrote the script for a film called Paul, about two young men who encounter a comedic extraterrestrial alien during a road trip across the US. The completed script appeared on the 2008 "Brit List", a film-industry-compiled survey of the best unproduced British screenplays, inspired by the American Black List. In those films and in Spaced, Pegg typically plays the leading hero while Frost plays the sidekick. However Paul reverses this dynamic. The film was released in 2011.
  Pegg played engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in Star Trek, the eleventh film in the Star Trek film series, released 8 May 2009. He reprised the role in the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond (2016), also co-writing the latter. In 201
caption: Pegg at a premiere for Star Trek in April 2009
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