Simon Pegg writes about his ascent to the upper echelons of geek culture in his autobiography Nerd Do Well.

Simon Pegg shouldn’t be famous. He’s the kind of goofy nerd who in his youth would kiss a picture of Carrie Fisher each night before going to bed — not the kind of guy that Hollywood executives would put in the “highly bankable” column.

At least that’s what his quirky and inspiring new autobiography Nerd Do Well would lead you to believe. (Seriously, there’s a section that claims most articles about him start similarly to the above — Wired.com is just following form).

But, truth be told, nerds are huge right now and Pegg happened to grow up in the generation that would take geekiness from the fringes of culture right into the mainstream.

Thus he’s a nerd hero — a member of the geekerati.

In the just-released book, the writer and star of everything from Shaun of the Dead to Paul traces his early forays into nerdia as a kid growing up in England (discovering a love of theater as well as Star Trek). He talks about how those passions eventually lead him to travel in the circles of the geeks he admired (like starring in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot!).

Wired.com got on the phone with Pegg to talk about 3-D movies, living the dream, his future projects with long-time collaborators Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, and trying to get his childhood crush Fisher to follow him on Twitter.

Wired.com: With Nerd Do Well you managed to avoid a lot of the trappings of the traditional celebrity autobiography. How’d you manage to do that?

Simon Pegg: That’s what I didn’t want to do. The idea of writing something that was just, you know, standard didn’t interest me and made me feel a little bit ill. It’s that thing of like assuming that people want to know about you makes me feel uncomfortable, which is why I drifted away from writing anecdotal stories about work and just tried to come up with something a bit more relatable. There’s plenty of these memoirs that come out every year and they’re not written by the people they’re about and they’re just chronologies of the mundane, and I didn’t want to write that.

Simon Pegg
Photo: Casey Moore

Wired.com: And so many of them are ghostwritten, which yours is clearly not because it’s in your voice.

Pegg: I was surprised finding out how many of them are ghostwritten and I felt quite smug about the fact that I’d written mine.

Wired.com: Parts of the book are written as a fictionalized version of your life where you are essentially playing a James Bond-like character. Was that your script-writing coming to the forefront?

Pegg: That stuff wrote itself. I regarded that as taking a break from the actual book, because I really loved writing those chapters. I was initially writing them to make Ben [Dunn], my editor, laugh. It would really tickle him.

There are some jokes in there that relate to ridiculous private jokes between me and him about other authors. The thing about the small swimming pool relates to someone else he looks after whose house he went to and found out they had a tiny pool.

Those chapters were just something that every now and then, when my brain was hurting from having to recall so much detail from my past, I could just sort of check out from reality and write that nonsense. It’s fun to try to write badly and wield language like a psychopath with a chainsaw. It was much more fun than telling stories from my youth.

Wired.com: It also seemed to allow you to be self-deprecating about the entire concept of writing an autobiography.

‘It’s fun to try to write badly and wield language like a psychopath with a chainsaw.’

Pegg: Exactly. It was an opportunity to undermine the whole. By being so awkwardly self-aggrandizing, it was showing that I was aware that the whole thing was itself self-aggrandizing.

Wired.com: The book is, essentially, about a geeky kid who gets to travel in the circles of his idols, but are there any geek icons you haven’t met yet?

Pegg: Oh yeah. When you start getting away from the more traditionally nerdy people there are people like the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese that are sort of my film idols [who I haven't met]. Raising Arizona had a seismic effect on me as a writer and even as an actor. So the Coen brothers would be fantastic to meet up with and work with at some point. Edgar [Wright] has met them. Our paths just haven’t crossed. Or like Martin Scorsese. I sat behind him at the BAFTAs once and I just wanted to touch his head.

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