Fresh from playing a feckless journalist in his latest flick, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Empire favourite Simon Pegg was safely back on the VIP side of the red carpet in Leicester Square on Wednesday night.
Starring in the movie adaptation of UK writer Toby Young's embarrassing memoirs, the Brit comic discovered that a journo’s life is not always a happy one.
“It did give me some perspective yeah,” says Pegg of working on the other side of the media fence. “I did kind of get a different view of what they go through and what it takes to be a journalist.
“In the film, whenever I interview someone I have to say that I really like their film, so whenever a journalist now says to me that they really liked the film I just say, ‘Do you? Do you really?’”
The film marks the cinematic debut of Bob Weide, the guy who gave us the televisual masterpiece that is Curb Your Enthusiasm. Did his previous experience of dealing with on-screen assholes help with the making of this movie?
“Yeah I think so, the thinking was that if I could deal with a social misfit like Larry David and make him acceptable to the public at large, I could do the same thing with a character based on Toby Young,” says Weide.
During the making of the film, rumours abounded that Young was ejected from the set for making too much of ruckus, was that true?
“Toby was on set occasionally but you kind of have to keep him at an arm’s distance,” says Weide. “It’s kind of like having a young child on the set and you have to say, ‘Now Toby sit here and behave and don’t talk to people’. All the stories of him being banned from the set are his exaggerations for comic effect.”
No stranger to social embarrassment, Young freely admits that he was the butt of many a slight from the movie-makers. One such experience found Weide and Pegg poking fun at the author’s less-than-svelte physique.
“It obviously feels good to have a film made about your life and I’m not about to start complaining but it’s really not that flattering an experience,” says Young. “When I first sat down with Simon and the director, he looked at me and looked at him and said, ‘You know what Simon, you’re either gonna have to gain 20 pounds or wear a fat suit’. Simon actually gained two stone to get into character, he was in Run Fat Boy Run and played a character called Fat Boy but he still wasn’t fat enough to play me.”
How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, which also stars Kirsten Dunst, Megan Fox, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges, will be released in UK cinemas on October 3.