It seems like a matter of time before every notable actor you can think of will do a Marvel movie or TV series. Just this year we’ve had Charlize Theron, Ethan Hawke, and Oscar Isaac join the MCU. Some are more reluctant, like Simon Pegg, who’d rather stick to more “grown-up” fare.
“I kind of want to do more sort of grown-up stuff in the future,” Pegg told Newsweek, when asked if he’d consider the MCU, or any other major franchise beyond Mission: Impossible. “I think Mission: Impossible is a very grown up franchise. I think it’s a franchise which is aimed less at big kids than it is just big people, but I quite want to do some more drama.”
Having risen to prominence with zombie movie Shaun of the Dead, Pegg has been a mainstay of the Mission: Impossible action movies since the third instalment in 2006. Besides helping Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt save the world over and over, he’s leant his vocal chords to Ice Age, and featured in the rebooted Star Trek movies.
That’s quite a few major properties to juggle, no wonder he fancies doing a drama movie or something a little smaller scale. For nothing else, the time commitment is substantial.
“I’m not in any rush to join the MCU or anything like that,” he adds. “I kind of feel like I want to be a bit more free. You join those things and then you’re tied to them for years and that can be a little bit restrictive.”
You can see him back as Benji Dunn in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, coming to cinemas July 14, 2023. In the meantime, Pegg the lead in Apple TV animated movie Luck, out August 5.