Simon Pegg is shutting down any hope for a “Shaun of the Dead” sequel amid its 20th anniversary. Pegg, who collaborated with writer/director Edgar Wright for the “Cornetto Trilogy,” which included “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” and “The World’s End,” told Variety that he will reunite with Wright for another comedy soon — just not within the “Shaun of the Dead” world.
“It’s lovely to be asked, and the following that film has is the best you can hope for as a filmmaker, but ‘Shaun’ is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it’s a story that to add to it — like ‘Alien 3′ did to Aliens’ — might end up detracting from the original,” Pegg said. “So certainly when Edgar and I make our next film, we’re going to really disappoint everybody.”
“Shaun of the Dead” starred Pegg as one of the sole survivors of a zombie apocalypse. Bill Nighy and Pegg’s frequent partner Nick Frost co-starred in the 2005 indie horror comedy hit. Pegg assured fans that he will work with both Frost and Wright again soon, saying, “It’s just a question of when, not if.”
Wright and Pegg even recently were “trying to settle on a basic premise for something” in the comedy realm. Pegg added that he “promised” Wright he “wouldn’t make another comedy before they work together.” Pegg previously told The Guardian in 2023 that whichever project Wright and him work on next, there will be no affiliation with their past films. “We’re not going to rely on what we’ve done before,” Pegg said at the time. “I like the idea of pissing people off.“
“Shaun of the Dead” catapulted Wright’s directing career, with auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter applauding the feature.
“I remember turning up for the ‘Shaun of the Dead’ premiere at the ArcLight on Sunset and Edgar was sat there with Quentin Tarantino,” Pegg, who is now promoting the final installment of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” said to Variety. “There were lots of cool people there, and we got such a lot of support from Quentin and George Romero and John Carpenter and Stephen King and Peter Jackson … all these guys sort of stepped up for us — I think because they saw a lot of themselves in Edgar.”
And Pegg is ready to return to indies like “Shaun of the Dead,” too. “I spent the first part of my career kind of indulging a lot of the things I loved as a child, but ever since I became a parent, they’re just not my priority,” he said after starring in “Star Trek” and more franchises. “It just doesn’t interest me anymore.”
Wright, in the meantime, is revisiting Stephen King’s “The Running Man” with Glen Powell in the lead. All roads do seem to lead back to Pegg as the “peg” between collaborators: Pegg’s longtime “Mission: Impossible” co-star Tom Cruise is famously Powell’s mentor after the duo worked on “Top Gun: Maverick” together.
