There are a few things Simon Pegg can't live without. From a bottle of hot sauce and Athletic Greens to his Tiffany dog tag necklace from his wife, these are the actor's ten essentials.
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
Director: Jean-Luc Lukunku
Director of Photography: Brad Wickham
Editor: Paul Isakson
Creative Producer: Arielle Neblett
Production Manager: James Pipitone
Production Coordinator: Jamal Colvin
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Rebecca Van Der Meulen
Audio: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ziyne Abdo
Gaffer : Niklas Moller
Post Production Supervisor: Rachael Knight
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
Director: Jean-Luc Lukunku
Director of Photography: Brad Wickham
Editor: Paul Isakson
Creative Producer: Arielle Neblett
Production Manager: James Pipitone
Production Coordinator: Jamal Colvin
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Rebecca Van Der Meulen
Audio: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ziyne Abdo
Gaffer : Niklas Moller
Post Production Supervisor: Rachael Knight
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 I like powders, legal powders I might add, nothing else.
00:04 Hi GQ, this is Simon Pegg
00:06 and these are the items I cannot live without.
00:09 This is hot sauce, Cholula, it's a classic.
00:15 It's a lovely entry level hot sauce, this one,
00:18 if you're just starting out
00:20 and you're trying to sort of ease your way
00:21 into burning face.
00:23 I kind of just love the pain.
00:26 Although this isn't particularly painful, this one.
00:28 There are ones out there
00:28 that will actually cause you physical damage.
00:31 I do have this one, which is like an oil
00:33 and you put it on a cocktail stick
00:35 and you just put it on your tongue like that
00:37 and you have eight minutes of flaming agony,
00:40 but it gets you quite high.
00:42 And as someone who is completely sober
00:44 and doesn't partake of any other stimulants
00:46 other than caffeine, it's a nice little bonus.
00:48 Chanel Antaeus, I like to have a specific smell.
00:52 I don't like to chop and change my scents.
00:54 Some guys have like a day scent and an evening scent,
00:57 but I just really love this.
00:58 I feel like it's a bit me.
00:59 I've had people say that they were on the bus or something
01:02 and someone was wearing this and they thought,
01:04 oh, Simon's on the bus.
01:05 But I think they might be discontinuing it,
01:07 which is a tragedy.
01:09 I'll have to get a new smell
01:11 and then no one will know who I am.
01:12 I'm terrified.
01:13 Young Greg Tarzan Davis,
01:15 who is a new addition to the Mission Impossible cast,
01:17 plays Agent Dagar.
01:18 At the premiere of Mission Impossible in New York,
01:20 we had what I can only describe as a scent collision.
01:23 He was wearing a beautiful Armani suit.
01:25 I saw him, I needed to touch him.
01:27 We embraced and our scents combined in the air
01:29 into some super scent that a lot of people around,
01:32 men and women, became spontaneously aroused.
01:35 This is a really obvious one.
01:37 It would be a lie to say that this isn't probably
01:40 the most essential item to me.
01:41 It's an office, it's a recreational tool,
01:44 it's a viewer of media,
01:47 and I generally always have it in my hand,
01:49 much to my wife's chagrin.
01:50 You know, it's got all my photographs,
01:52 it's got my entire daughter's life on it.
01:54 So I have thousands and thousands of photos
01:57 documenting her entire life,
01:58 which is incredibly important to me.
02:00 You invariably start a group chat with your fellow cast
02:02 members, crew members, whatever.
02:04 So yes, I have a Star Trek group chat
02:06 and a Mission group chat.
02:07 Tom Cruise is probably the most famous person in my phone.
02:10 He's not in there under his name, he's under a fake name.
02:13 It's always a bit of a thrill to get a text from Tom,
02:16 unsolicited.
02:17 It makes me laugh when something comes in,
02:19 'cause my wife teases me that I love him.
02:22 [laughs]
02:24 I do.
02:25 So when I get a text, I'm like,
02:26 "Oh, look, look who's texting me."
02:27 "Oh, it's your boyfriend," she says.
02:29 [upbeat music]
02:31 This, which I'm wearing right now,
02:32 is a Tiffany dog tag that my wife gave me,
02:35 and it's inscribed with S, M, and M,
02:37 which is Simon, Maureen, and Matilda.
02:40 This is something I wear when I'm away,
02:42 just 'cause it, you know, it keeps them close.
02:45 It's difficult.
02:46 One of the hardest things about my job
02:47 is having to leave home all the time.
02:49 I don't really like leaving,
02:51 so this helps me just to sort of like
02:53 keep them close to my heart.
02:54 Sickening, absolutely sickening.
02:56 Here are my powders.
02:59 I like powders, legal powders, I might add.
03:02 Nothing else.
03:03 These are athletic greens, or AG1.
03:06 It basically gives you all the greens
03:08 that you need for the day,
03:09 whatever it is at the moment,
03:10 you're 12 a day, whatever,
03:12 'cause it is actual veg crushed into a powder,
03:14 but it has like 75 vitamins in it.
03:16 I'm reading the back now.
03:17 [laughs]
03:18 AG1, send me free stuff.
03:20 This is protein powder from Form.
03:24 It's always good to go for a clean protein.
03:26 This is a vegan protein powder.
03:27 I'm not a vegan, but I appreciate veganosity,
03:30 even if I don't understand it.
03:32 And this is something I will have after my workout.
03:35 Mission Impossible is responsible
03:37 for getting me into fitness in my later life.
03:39 When you look at me in Mission Impossible 3,
03:41 I literally look like a potato in a cardigan.
03:43 So when it came to do Ghost Protocol,
03:44 I'd kind of just discovered the gym.
03:47 I'm not planning on doing any Tom Cruise level stunts,
03:50 but planning is not a thing that you ever can really do
03:54 when you make a Mission Impossible movie.
03:55 You have to just allow it.
03:57 I don't think I could ever get the script and read it,
03:59 and it says Benji paraglides into a shark's anus,
04:02 and I'd have to say, "Fine, I'll do that.
04:04 "I'll fly right into that thing."
04:06 It means something to the audience
04:07 if they can see that it's the actor doing the stunt.
04:09 So if he asked me to jump off a cliff on a motorcycle,
04:14 I would, which reminds me of that old thing
04:16 my mom used to say, "Oh, well, if your friends asked you
04:18 "to jump off a cliff, would you?"
04:20 I guess the answer finally is yes.
04:21 [laughs]
04:23 [upbeat music]
04:25 Coffee.
04:28 I love, love, love coffee,
04:30 and it's something that I look forward to in the evening
04:33 before I go to bed,
04:34 that I'm gonna have one in the morning.
04:36 It's my last remaining vice, really,
04:38 caffeine, if you can call it a vice,
04:39 and that first little hit in the morning
04:41 is an absolute delight.
04:43 Growing up as a Brit, I was tea.
04:44 I was a tea man, you know?
04:46 I started drinking coffee the first time
04:48 I came to New York with Edgar Wright.
04:49 We used to come at the end of the century.
04:52 God, that sounds like a long time ago.
04:53 We used to come to New York to buy DVDs.
04:56 We'd go and do loads of New York-y stuff,
04:58 and we'd go to Kim's Video in St. Mark's Place
05:00 and buy American DVDs,
05:01 because American DVDs had loads of extras on back in the day.
05:05 So we'd come over to New York,
05:06 we'd stay at the Soho Grand,
05:08 and then in the morning, we'd come down,
05:09 and there was free coffee, free coffee,
05:11 and it just became a religion to me after that.
05:14 Okay, this is a basic style staple, I think.
05:19 It's the Henley T-shirt, which is a design classic.
05:22 It's comfortable, it's stylish, it's slightly rugged.
05:26 Shows off my guns a little bit.
05:28 [laughs]
05:29 The Henley.
05:30 Generally speaking, though, because I'm such a homebody,
05:32 I spend my life in sweatpants and a Henley T-shirt.
05:35 That's where I'm most comfortable.
05:36 To do this kind of thing and to get out there
05:38 and get to dress up is a real thrill,
05:40 because I so rarely do it.
05:42 I don't go out, I don't go to parties.
05:44 I'm married, I have a child.
05:45 You know, the primary reasons for going out
05:47 is to get pissed and get laid.
05:50 I don't need to do either of those things.
05:52 I fricking love sunglasses.
05:55 That and the right headphones for my snowboarding helmet
05:58 are the things that I spend the most money on.
06:00 These are some of the sunglasses
06:02 that I bought out on this press tour.
06:03 I get together with my stylist, Arabella,
06:05 and we get an outfit, when we get a look,
06:07 we'll pair it with exactly the right pair of sunglasses.
06:09 For instance, these would look nice with this suit,
06:11 'cause they have blue lenses,
06:12 and so you're pairing the blue with the blue of the suit
06:16 and the blue of the background,
06:17 which I asked to be arranged for me,
06:18 so I would coordinate this entire studio today.
06:20 I probably have a few hundred pairs at home.
06:23 I lose them a lot.
06:24 That annoys me.
06:25 I lost a lovely pair of aviators in Rome.
06:27 Still gutted about that.
06:28 Music is such a huge part of my life.
06:32 My father is a musician, and I grew up, you know,
06:36 listening to music, I listen to music constantly.
06:38 I'm a bit of an old indie kid.
06:39 I have a very broad music taste,
06:40 much broader than when I was younger,
06:43 and I was very tribal with my music.
06:44 It was like, my music's cool,
06:45 and everyone else's music is shite.
06:47 But now I'm much more sort of egalitarian
06:49 when it comes to my music taste.
06:51 My daughter, I went through a sort of K-pop phase.
06:55 She was big into BTS.
06:56 When she first talked about it, I was like,
06:58 "What, that's like a boy band.
06:59 "Why are you into a boy band?"
07:01 And she said, "No, listen to this."
07:02 And she played me a couple of songs,
07:04 and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, this is pretty good."
07:06 Certainly those BTS boys are an incredible, tight outfit.
07:10 They're all beautiful.
07:11 They've done some amazing tunes.
07:13 The Steve Aoki remix of "Mic Drop"
07:15 is one of my favorite songs.
07:17 It's just such a banger.
07:18 So yeah, that's that for a 53-year-old indie kid.
07:22 That might surprise people.
07:24 There's a couple of fitness items that I like to use.
07:28 This is a MiZone.
07:30 Essentially, it's a heart rate monitor.
07:32 You pair it with your phone on the app,
07:33 and it tells you when you're in certain zones of heart rate.
07:36 So you're in gray, blue, green, yellow, or red,
07:39 and you can tailor your workouts
07:41 to sort of stay in certain zones
07:42 or kind of only reach a certain zone,
07:44 and you can see how quickly you recover
07:45 back into the gray zone or whatever.
07:47 This is a Lumen, and this is a metabolism tracker.
07:50 You wake up in the morning, and you blow into it,
07:53 and it tells you what your body is doing
07:55 in terms of what it's burning.
07:56 So if you're burning carbs mainly,
07:58 and if you're burning fats, it'll tell you.
08:00 Yeah, I mean, aside from the kind of, you know,
08:02 the euphoria of physical fitness,
08:03 we try and keep things as light as possible on set.
08:06 And Tom is a bit of a prankster.
08:07 When he's kind of not feeling the weight of the movie on him,
08:10 he can be extremely mischievous.
08:12 And we've had several occasions
08:13 when he would switch on my seat heater.
08:16 When we were in Morocco,
08:18 when we were doing the car chase in Morocco,
08:19 so that I kept overheating, and I didn't know why,
08:21 and it was 'cause he kept switching my seat heater on.
08:23 He'll always sort of just move into shot.
08:26 When we're doing my, say we're shooting me now,
08:28 and we're doing my dialogue,
08:29 and it's what's called a dirty,
08:30 so you can see Tom's shoulder,
08:32 he'll just creep, so he blocks me.
08:34 It's like an ongoing war we have to upstage each other.
08:38 It's fun making films, and it should be fun,
08:40 because we're essentially playing,
08:42 and that's what filmmaking is.
08:44 Thanks, GQ.
08:45 This has been a blast.
08:46 I've really enjoyed demonstrating my essentials to you.
08:49 I'll see you soon.
08:49 Thanks for watching.
08:50 Go see "Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One"
08:53 on the biggest screen you possibly can.
08:55 (upbeat music)