His new film may be called Hector and the Search For Happiness, but Simon Pegg seems to have figured out the secret to personal fulfillment some time ago. The star of Shaun of the Dead, Star Trek and Spaced says fatherhood set him on the path to salvation.

Five years ago, he became father to Matilda. He decided to stop drinking, which was sapping his creativity and energy.
“There is something about reaching the milestone of middle-age that puts you in mind of your own mortality,” the actor muses. “You start thinking about your life in a way you don’t when you’re younger, when you think you’re indestructible and don’t want to commit to the complications of adulthood. For me, getting older and becoming a father helped me straighten out what’s important to me and what’s not.”
Then again, Pegg has been thinking deeply about these issues for years. From a college thesis that offered a Marxist interpretation of Star Wars, to the metaphors of capitalism, control and hegemony that were key a feature of the Edgar Wright-directed Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), Pegg is fascinated by society’s relationship with freedom and fulfilment. Today, he declares, modern life in first world countries is so privileged we’ve forgotten how to be happy.
“Privilege can make people bored, and quite numb,” he asserts. “It’s interesting; the more choices you have, the more elusive happiness becomes. You have so much choice: you become existentially quite stunted, I think.”
Fame, he reports, does not lead to happiness.
“We measure success in a very reductive, status-centric way,” he remarks. “The only true measure of success is happiness. If you’re unhappy doing what you do, no matter how much money that earns you or fame that gets you, it’s not a success. Fame is really just about your anonymity evaporating, and that can be quite a stressful thing. You want to go to the shops, and everyone wants to talk to you, or feels entitled to a piece of you. It can often be a pain.”
However, with roles in Star Trek and Mission Impossible 5 looming, Pegg admits he’s not running from stardom.
“I don’t have that romanticised vision of fame. It’s a price I am willing to pay,” he remarks. “I’m not doing amateur theatre because I love acting. I enjoy working on big, accomplished productions, because you’re working with people at the absolute top of their game, masters of entertainment. It’s a brilliant thing.”
In his movies, he likes to subvert the comedy with glimmers of darkness. In zombie flick Shaun of the Dead we see his character faced with the horrific decision to kill his own mother; in The World’s End Pegg’s motor-mouth character Gary is revealed to be a suicidal alcoholic.
“In the sort of comedy Edgar Wright and I write, we want to focus on what is important,” Pegg explains. “It’s not just about jokes – if a film is just about jokes and they don’t land, the whole film falls apart. However, if the piece is about something bigger, more complex, you can have the ‘emotional relief’ – where things can get serious and emotional and there’s a moment of real reflection that offsets the jokes. That’s what I liked about Hector – it acknowledges that, to be truly happy, you have to know what the opposite is.”
Pegg wrote about his own experiences of hardship and otherwise in his autobiography Nerd Do Well which delves into not only the divorce of his parents, but also his experience as a geeky outsider. “Writing that was like therapy!” he laughs. “I felt quite raw afterwards. I’d kind of locked certain things away in boxes. Once you start digging around it’s strange to have an avalanche of memories open up. It was stuff I was comfortable sharing – there’s plenty not in there! I’m happy to keep the rest to myself!”

Hector and the Search for Happiness is in cinemas now.