![]() Today, he is so successful he genuinely doesn’t have time to come to the interview. Wright was an unknown 24-year-old when he directed Spaced. He also made the Cornetto Trilogy – Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – which starred Frost and were co-written and directed by Wright. After making Spaced as unknown twentysomethings, Hynes – née Stevenson – became one of Britain’s best-loved TV stars, winning Baftas for her performances in W1A and There She Goes, while Pegg, who these days has the carved cheekbones of a man who hasn’t been near a carb in years, went on to endearingly improbable Hollywood glory, starring in Star Trek and alongside Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible franchise. This is less shocking for the cast who, as Hynes puts it, “have packed in quite a lot since then”. This weekend, the cast will reunite for an all-day event as the show – somewhat shockingly – is turning 21 this year. Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson with Mark Heap in Spaced. Like I said, it’s hard to believe this isn’t Meteor Street. “We haven’t time for that now, OK?” Hynes replies, with an exaggerated eyeroll. “What’s your problem with it?” he says, as if squaring up for a fight. He only rouses himself when Hynes says she “still can’t just enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. If he hadn’t long ago stopped playing Mike Watt – Spaced’s army enthusiast who tunes into a slightly different frequency from the rest of humanity – I’d assume Frost was an unlikely proponent of method acting. ![]() But,” he says, with a head tilt towards Pegg and Hynes’s as-yet unoccupied seats, “they’ll absolutely love it.” When I explain it’s for Spaced he immediately replies: “I don’t like talking about the past. ![]() He is the first of the trio to arrive, whereupon he announces he knows neither what publication this interview is for nor what it’s supposed to be about. Well, except Jess, who was in Swing Kids, of course” “Yeah, cheers for bringing that up.”)Īnd then there’s Frost, working his way through a bacon sandwich and maintaining a silent detachment. (“None of us had done anything before Spaced. On the show Simon and I represent the middle, and Twist and Mike were more extreme, like the feminine and the masculine … ”) Meanwhile, Tim-I-mean-Pegg makes charming witticisms from the sofa and occasional light digs at his co-stars. (“I didn’t want Daisy to be self-conscious, I wanted her to be spontaneous without angst. Today, Daisy-I-mean-Hynes, who as well as starring in the show co-wrote it with Pegg, fills the air with talk in galloping sentences that you have to cling on tight to in order to follow the logic. When the show aired, its meta humour, and jokes that were both silly and utterly brilliant, made cult stars of all the show’s major players, including its then-unknown director, Edgar Wright. Accompanying them on their deeply prosaic adventures (a paintball tournament one week, a club night the next), which somehow achieved the heights of mythic glory, were their downstairs neighbour, tortured artist Brian (Mark Heap), his girlfriend Twist (Katy Carmichael), who worked “in fashion”, by which she meant a dry cleaners, Tim’s childhood friend Mike (Frost) and their landlady Marsha (Julia Deakin). Set on the fictional street in north London, Spaced told the deceptively simple story of two flatmates: aspiring-if-she-could-just-be-arsed writer Daisy Steiner and thwarted comic-book artist Tim Bisley. But by God, it’s easy to forget that, sitting opposite Nick Frost, Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg, as they talk about their seminal sitcom Spaced, and each so jarringly reminiscent of their characters it verges on unnerving. In fact, I’m in the BFI office in central London at the fag end of 2019. I am not in 23 Meteor Street, circa 1999. ![]()
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