Culture
15 Jun 18

Simon Pegg Opens Up About Battles With Depression & Alcoholism

The British star has spoken openly for the first time about how he was seriously affected with mental health issues just as his career was taking off.

"I was depressed. I had always been susceptible to it. But at the same time as I started to ascend into what would conventionally be regarded as a success, I was going down," he confessed in a new interview with Empire film magazine.
"The more material success presented itself to me, the less I could understand why it wasn’t fulfilling me in any way. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fulling me, it was because I was depressed. It’s not a mood. It’s a condition.”
The 48-year-old actor told how he started to hit the bottle to deal with his depression.
"I just drank more heavily… If you look at Burke & Hare, I’m bloated and fucking dead-eyed…I look at it now and think, 'Fuck me, I was in a dark place then'. I was drunk a lot of the time and I was profoundly unhappy.”
He decided to seek help after he experienced a horrifying blackout.
“I got well in 2010. I stopped drinking. I got a little bit of help," he explained.
Eventually I crashed out. At Comic-Con in 2010 — I’ve never told anyone this — we were promoting Paul and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere," he revealed.