The British geek heroes, whose new movie The World’s End will be released on Friday, tell BuzzFeed all about the drinking, laughs, struggles, music, chance meetings, and friendships that came before success.
Getty Images/Gareth Cattermole
When the triumvirate of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright burst into American consciousness with their 2004 zombie-rom-com Shaun of the Dead, the cult hit established them as a three-headed, genre-bending geek super-team. The movie sent stateside viewers scrambling back to discover their previous collaboration, the TV series Spaced (which debuted in 1999 and aired for two seasons), and by the time their next movie, 2007's cop comedy Hot Fuzz, hit screens, the trio were entrenched as perhaps the greatest British bromance since John and Paul.
Wright, Pegg, and Frost retroactively branded their film collaborations the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy — without a shared story line, the only solid link between Shaun and Fuzz was a bit appearance by the British ice cream brand — and this weekend, the long-awaited third chapter in the series will debut stateside.
Each of their collaborations — beginning with Spaced — can be seen as a thematic chapter of a playful anthology about the long arc of a Gen-X dude's journey to semi-maturity. The World's End represents a graduation of sorts, as it finds the men making the leap across the great life chasm that is a 40th birthday and focuses on the pains of nascent middle age and the dangers of nostalgia.
The World's End has bits and inspirations from each of the three men's younger years, and though you'd be forgiven the mistaken impression that they've been friends since birth, it took until their mid-twenties for the trio to meet. Here is the story of those early days, both before the friendships locked into place, and then the heady first few years of their fledgling careers.
Edgar Wright directing his first film in 1994.
Edgar Wright/Twitter
Nick Frost: I had my 19th birthday sitting in the River Jordan, pissed out of my head, up near the headwaters near Mount Meron, up in the north of Israel.
Frost was in the midst of a two-year stint on a kibbutz in Israel, having retreated from a rough adolescence in East London; he dropped out of school at 15 to help support his ill parents, and needed a change.
NF: I was an 18-year-old kid with not much direction in the U.K., didn't really want to do anything. I had a friend called Brendan who had been on a kibbutz. He said, 'You should go, it'd be good for you.' So I went and I just loved it. It was like being in a labor camp. I'm an early riser, so I'm happy to get up early. You get up at 4:30, you do six hours of labor, and you're finished by noon. Perfect for me. You get the day off, there was a pub, you get all the free drinks you could want, free cigarettes. All my clothes were given to me. I liked the regimented life. I think I would have been all right in the army or prison. There's that thing about, you put your wash in on Tuesday, you get it back on Thursday. On Monday you get 200 cigarettes. You get three aerograms a week. I loved working on the land.
It was a big change from his previous party-hard lifestyle.
NF: I was a raver. I was a house kid. I think my first kind of party memories were being 16 and going to these big illegal raves in aircraft hangars in 1988. I loved the Stone Roses. I went to Spike Island when I was 17. I was a raver and an indie kid ... I went to the Hacienda, but I don't remember much about it. I remember sleeping in my mate Ian's Peugeot, because we had no money. We went up and had no money and we slept in his Peugeot for a bit, that's literally what I remember.
His future friends spent their teenage years in more domesticated, though no less formative, situations.
Edgar Wright: Here's the silly thing. I grew up six miles from the Glastonbury festival, and as a teenager, I never went. I think I was a bit square at that age, and if I'm completely honest, I was a little bit nervous about drugs. Because all I would hear is people talking about stories about going to Glastonbury and doing ecstasy, and then on the flip side, especially on the more conservative channels, you'd hear stories about people who died on ecstasy after drinking too much water. I remember thinking, I don't know if I want to do the ecstasy thing right now. I was definitely — as a teenager, at least — much more wary of drugs.
Simon Pegg: The 14th of February 1989, I was at university in Bristol, probably writing an essay on Woody Allen or something like that. It was the height of PC, I was probably a very conscientious young student, living in Bristol. I was still skateboarding, getting drunk and high and stuff, but I was doing it in academia, not living in the Middle East.
EW: I was already making amateur movies on Super 8, on video with my school friends. Maybe I was already out of college by then, but I used to kind of still go back to my hometown during college every holiday and hang out with my friends who I had been thick as thieves with as a teenager. The reason it's five friends in the movie is because I used to hang out with five friends in my hometown. I definitely used to drink a lot more than I do now, and I definitely used to go to the pub a lot more.
The World's End is about moving on from one's past life, and the guys — at their current ages — are split on whether they'd be friends with their 19-year-old selves, in the event that time travel could zap them here.
EW: I think yeah, I had the aspirations of what I was doing now, even then I was making lots of movies, and I made a low-budget movie when I was 20 [A Fistful of Fingers]. It's a very silly movie, and it was one of those things that was completely powered along by youthful naivety, because I think if I had thought about it any longer, it probably would have sort of completely collapsed. It was one of those things where I was very fortunate; it was complete luck that I got to make the movie in the first place. The only person who would give us any money to make a movie was a local newspaper editor who had seen my amateur movies and had just gotten some money from an inheritor, basically as a tax loss, he gave us £11,000 and we made the movie on that, until the money ran out.
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