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- I kind of always thought it would be all right.
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I thought I'd do okay.
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I have a lot of self-belief.
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By that, I don't mean arrogance,
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but I feel like you have to have the courage
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of your convictions in terms of what you want to do,
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you have to believe it, and I sound
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like a motivational speaker.
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Hi, I'm Simon Pegg, and this is the timeline of my career.
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[lively jazz piano music]
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- Tell us about everything.
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- Well, I believe that the films
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"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "RoboCop"
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both borrow heavily from my own life experiences.
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I never thought at any point in my career
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I would be speaking to Vanity Fair
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about "Six Pairs of Pants."
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"Six Pairs of Pants" was a sketch show.
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It wasn't even on national television in the U.K.,
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it was on local television, and it was a comedy sketch show.
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But it's where I met Jessica Hynes
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and forged a relationship which would
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carry me forward to "Spaced" and beyond,
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so it was a very important show in that respect.
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I think you can probably find bits of it on YouTube.
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I hope not.
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I'd come out of university and decided to do
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stand-up as a way of having some autonomy
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and not having to wait for the phone to ring.
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And this comedy sketch show, they put an alert out
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for stand-ups to come and audition for their show,
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and my agent just sent me along and I got it.
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It was just an audition, you know?
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So I was a stand-up, but I wanted to get back into acting,
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'cause that was kinda my first love.
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I always wanted to be an actor, from when I was a kid,
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and my mom was sort of into community theater
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and I used to go along to it with her,
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and I was in a load of shows when I was a kid.
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And when I was about 15, I realized that I could
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quite possibly do it as a career,
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even though I was from essentially,
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Tatooine, in terms of the town I was in.
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But I didn't really set out necessarily
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to be a comedy actor.
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I wasn't like, "I always wanted to be a comedy actor."
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I wanted to do everything, you know.
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- [Interviewer] Right.
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[someone wails in background] - I think you're upset
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about the house!
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[Brian sighs]
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- Why would I be upset about the house?
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This house is the one thing I can rely on,
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it's the one port in a storm.
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- Yeah, Jess and I just sort of really
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hit it off on "Six Pairs of Pants."
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We tried to do as many sketches as we could together.
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She just made me laugh so much,
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and that I always find that incredibly
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sort of attractive in anyone.
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I love people that make me laugh,
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and Jess was just an expert at that.
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And when we came to do a show
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on the Paramount Comedy Channel called "Asylum,"
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which Edgar Wright was directing,
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there was a dearth of female actors in the show.
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It was mainly stand-up comics,
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and stand-up, like, sadly, many areas of everywhere,
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was male-dominated.
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And I knew a girl, I knew a girl
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from "Six Pairs of Pants" who was brilliant,
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and funnier than anybody else in the room,
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and we should get her.
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So Jess came along to do "Asylum,"
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which was directed by Edgar.
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And there was a producer working on "Asylum"
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who was moving over to a different network
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who had the idea of Jess and I having a vehicle
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written for us to be in, because we worked
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really well together in "Asylum,"
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'cause we'd come off the back of our chemistry
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on "Six Pairs of Pants."
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And Jess and I said, "Yeah, we'd love that,
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"but can we write it?"
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And so we wrote "Spaced," and we asked if Edgar
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could direct it because we'd loved working with him
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on "Asylum," and that was how that little trio came about.
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I look back on that time and think,
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"Man, we were so lucky."
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We were that sort of naive and sure of ourselves,
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And the people around us as well, the personnel
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were all fairly young and they were sort of making roads
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into network TV, and Jess and I just went,
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"Yeah, okay, but we want to write it."
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That was our stipulation, like we had
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any kind of wiggle room to negotiate.
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but they were like, "Sure, okay."
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And along the whole way, for a long time,
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it was just like, "Sure, yeah, okay, yeah."
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We were enabled.
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I'd stepped into this world thinking,
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"Hey, everything just gets handed to you.
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"This is great."
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It's not the case.
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And I don't think "Spaced" would get made now.
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It would be experimented on, on a deep network,
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a digital satellite network somewhere,
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before we even saw the light of the mainstream.
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We just wanted to make something that really spoke to us,
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but none of the programs leveled at 20-somethings
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at the time really spoke to us in any way
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on a personal level.
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They were all very aspirational
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and they were full of beautiful people.
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As much as we loved "Friends,"
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we wanted to make the anti-"Friends"
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and have it be about what unemployed loser dropouts do.
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And people seemed to respond to it, which was lovely.
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Oh my God!
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[zombie gasps]
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She's so drunk!
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[chuckles]
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I wrote a scene in "Spaced" where Tim is playing
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Resident Evil under the influence of amphetamines
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and starts to live out the game,
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which was just an excuse, really, to shoot a sequence
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where I was jumping around killing zombies.
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I think it was one of the first things that we shot.
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Edgar really wanted to sort of lay out his stall
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and show what kind of show we were making to the producers.
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And we shot the sequence and we edited it together
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and showed it and said this is the kind of thing
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we were gonna do.
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And I never forget the degree of pride
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that I felt when "Spaced" aired,
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just after "Friends" finished on Friday night at 9:30,
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within minutes of "Friends" finishing,
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of their being a sort of lovefest on the couch
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at Central Perk, I blew off a zombie's head
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on television and felt such a joy, a swell of pride.
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And after shooting that sequence, Edgar and I
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were like, "Oh, it'd be great if we could make
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"a zombie film, wouldn't it?
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"Our own zombie film.
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"It could be about just us, you know,
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"like what would happen if it happened to us?"
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[laughs] And then that's how it was born.
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It's a wonderful thing when you step
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onto a film set of something you have written,
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because you see your own imagination writ large,
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you see your own imagination realized in places
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and situations, and that's really, really amazing.
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And so, to suddenly find ourselves
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in the Winchester set, or walking around Crouch End
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when it's literally teeming with zombies,
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was an amazing thing, and it still is.
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I didn't really think of where it was gonna be shown
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or if it would get shown or whether it would
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ever see the light of day in any other country
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other than the U.K.
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It was just, we were in the moment,
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we're making our movie and not hobbled
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by [laughs] the burden of expectation.
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It was kind of, "Let's just get this on DVD
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and then we can give it to our moms and that'll be fun."
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And then it came out in the U.K., and it was well received,
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and then it started to get attention in the U.S.,
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and George Romero saw it and a lot
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of our favorite directors saw it,
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and there was a little campaign to get
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it a theatrical release, which it did.
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And then we went out on tour, on a six-week tour
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of the U.S., me and Edgar and Nick.
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It was like being in a band.
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It was amazing.
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It was more like being in a band when we went back
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with "Hot Fuzz," 'cause people had liked our first album,
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so then we felt like little indie rock stars.
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Yeah, it was extraordinary.
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I look back on it now and just think,
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I'm glad I was that naive in a way.
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Oh, no, no, I'm serious.
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I've just come out of a relationship.
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[Shaun yelps]
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- Benji, what do you got?
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- Well, these hard drive platters are just fried.
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They just made a mess of them.
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There's just holes in them and stuff,
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and it's got scorched all the way through.
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And then there's, look, this one's got
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a hole in it and stuff.
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I don't believe it, I can't even look at it.
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Edgar and I were writing "Hot Fuzz,"
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and the phone rang upstairs and we put the call through,
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"Oh, J.J. Abrams is on the phone."
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I said, "What, the 'Alias' man?"
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We had a chat and he'd said he'd liked "Shaun of the Dead,"
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and he'd seen me and Edgar at the Saturn Awards,
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but he said he [laughs] didn't have the guts
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to come and say hello, which is hilarious to me
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because J.J.'s the most gregarious, ebullient human being
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you could ever meet.
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But he said, "Do you wanna come and do
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a bit of 'Mission: Impossible III'?"
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And I said, "Yeah, all right, why not?"
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And that was that.
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It was a really odd.
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And he said, "I'm gonna send you, I've got this new show."
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[laughs] This is great.
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"So I've just done this new show for ABC.
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"I'll send it to you."
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And he sent me the whole of the first season
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of "Lost" on individual DVDs,
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I got this big box, and I binged the whole show
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before it had even shown in the U.S.
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And I just thought, "Oh, this is amazing."
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Because I'd seen episodes of "Alias,"
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but I wasn't a regular viewer of the show.
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But that was it. I was, "Oh, this guy's brilliant.
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"I'll do this."
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So I went over and did my little cameo
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playing Tom Cruise's GPS.
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And it was just that period of time
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was a particularly rough patch,
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And I found myself in L.A. and I didn't really know L.A.
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I was in some hotel in Beverly Hills,
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and I couldn't quite understand
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how I couldn't walk anywhere.
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I'd step out and I'd look up these long boulevards
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like, "Where the hell is the shops [laughs] and stuff?
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"What is this place?"
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"This is bizarre."
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So I wound up just stuck in this hotel room
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for eight days waiting to be called,
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as these big movies, sometimes,
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the way they move, it's unpredictable,
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and [inhales sharply] I was just sorta slowly going insane.
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And I eventually got to set and I did my bit,
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but I was totally wired and very jet-lagged,
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and it was all very surreal.
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It was very strange to be occupying a space
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that I had kind of always dreamed of,
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making a movie in Hollywood with one
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of the biggest stars in the world,
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probably the biggest star in the world,
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and not to be enjoying it particularly.
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But that all turned around with the next one, thankfully.
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Well, however you spin this, there's one thing
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you haven't taken into account.