You ok little buddy?” Simon Pegg is cooing at something off camera. He bends down and scoops it up to reveal a big, brown bundle of fur. “This is Branwell,” announces Pegg, proud new dad to the puppy now chewing on the brim of his cap. The actor and writer is back from the school run and supervising the latest, boisterous member of the Pegg family.
This is how Pegg likes it: school runs, country air, dog s***. “I’m so hard to get out of the house,” says the 53-year-old, with that familiar irony and a wide grin. In fact, he’s wearing a souvenir from his last venture into the real world: a Death Cult T-shirt he picked up when the goth legends’ 40th-anniversary tour hit Brixton recently. None of this comes as a surprise. For as long as his career, which gained rocket boosters in 2004 with the seminal zombie-comedy Shaun of the Dead, Pegg has been cast as the British everyman: a pub-goer who stumbled into Hollywood and didn’t really care for it, ducking in only to film blockbusters like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible (the eighth entry of which he’s soon due to resume shooting with his good pal Tom Cruise), before retreating to the domestic contentment of Hertfordshire, where he lives with his wife, Maureen, and their teenage daughter, Tilly. Plus their three dogs.
