This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Simon Pegg, 56, graduated from the cult sitcom Spaced to the “Cornetto trilogy” movies he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) before finding Hollywood fame in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and as Scotty in JJ Abrams’s big-screen Star Trek reboot. In the Channel 4 thriller The Undeclared War – back for a second series after a four-year break – he plays Danny Patrick, the GCHQ head of operations tasked with keeping Britain safe from cyber attacks.
The Undeclared War is a scarily topical glimpse into the world of cyber espionage. Do you sleep a bit less easy since making it?
It is kind of terrifying. We’ve basically been fighting the Third World War since the internet happened. There’s this whole other front line that’s in constant movement. The fact is, we’ve become so reliant on the internet that if someone flipped a switch and it went down, millions of people would die.
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You’ve played tech guys in Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and now this. How tech-savvy are you in real life?
I like technology, but I don’t know the first thing about coding. I used to be able to program a Sinclair ZX81 to make a line of text repeat, but that’s it.
Have you been allowed inside the real GCHQ?
Several times. They have been really accommodating. I grew up near Cheltenham, my school was about five miles away from GCHQ, so we knew we were in the hot zone for a nuclear attack – which, in the mid-80s, was always going to happen “tomorrow”. So it’s a moment of circularity in my life that I’ve ended up making a show about it.
Have you deliberately been moving away from comedy roles?
I kind of want to be able to flex all my performance muscles, not just the comedy ones. If you enter the business through that door, you’re forever seen in that way. But it’s an underrated skill, comedy. There are no awards for best comedic performance – it’s seen as non-serious, so it’s not taken seriously.
Your life reads like a Hollywood tale: the movie geek who manifests his own successful screen career. But it didn’t necessarily make you happy – in 2010, you sought help for depression and alcoholism…
Personal happiness is something you have to find within yourself. Success helped me address that, in a way – realising that all the trappings of my life were everything I’d ever wished for, but there was still some disconnect there. Success is happiness, not money. And fame is something you earn through work, not because you have some kind of worth that exceeds other people’s.
How does your friend Tom Cruise embrace fame?
I feel like he’s sacrificed a degree of normality in order to be where he is. And it could make him miserable, but it doesn’t. He thrives on it. He’s kind of built for it. Whereas I cherish normality.
Was Mission: Impossible – the Final Reckoning as final as it sounds?
Well, I don’t know. Paramount don’t have many franchises, so I feel they’ll probably want to hang on to Mission. But there’d have to be a stop date before I sign up for it, because the last two took five years, and I don’t have time for that.
Which of your superstar pals, Tom Cruise or Coldplay’s Chris Martin, would you swap places with briefly?
Oh, Chris. Just because I walk in similar shoes to Tom, in terms of my day-to-day working life, turning up on set and making movies. But it would be really fun to front a band for a week.
It’s become an internet meme that Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden is you 20 years ago. Are you worried about him stealing your lunch, career-wise?
No. Me and Jack are constantly trying to find something to do together where we can play brothers. I’m slightly too young to play his dad, unless I was an errant teenager. We laugh about it.
You wrote a memoir called Nerd Do Well – but has the time come to put away childish things?
I’m far less geeky than I used to be. In my 20s, I was still reading comic books and playing video games. I think when you become a parent [he has a 17-year-old daughter, Tilly, with his wife Maureen], you have to leave a lot of that stuff behind – the things you used to fill your life with. You hang onto your childhood, because nothing has necessitated your growth. I’m still very geeky about cinema, but it’s not like I rush out to see the new Star Wars movie. I couldn’t care less now.
The Undeclared War season 2 premieres at 9pm on Channel 4 on Tuesday 21 July 2026.
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