Pegg’s Battle With Depression
2 min read
It would have seemed to outsiders that Simon Pegg had a good life and career success, but in reality he was “profoundly unhappy.”
“I was depressed,” he said. “I had always been susceptible to it. But at the same time as I started to ascend into what would conventionally be regarded as a success, I was going down.”
His career success “wasn’t fulfilling me in any way. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fulfilling me; it was because I was depressed. It’s not a mood. It’s a condition.”
He used alcohol to self-medicate and it took its toll on him. “If you look at Burke & Hare [2010], I’m bloated and fucking dead-eyed…I look at it now and think, ‘Fuck me; I was in a dark place then.’ I was drunk a lot of the time and I was profoundly unhappy.”
While promoting Paul (2011), he “crashed out.” “I’ve never told anyone this,” he said; “We were promoting Paul and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere.”
Finally, things got better when he was working on Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011). The cast and crew of that movie, including J.J. Abrams, “took care of me and it helped me to get out of this dark place and realize that life was enjoyable. By the time I finished Ghost Protocol, I was better. J.J. [Abrams‘] unending faith in me makes me teary to think about it. He’s always stuck by me.”
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