The guys who brought you “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” take on the apocalypse to finish off their buddy-comedy trilogy with “The World’s End.” The sci-fi flick follows a group of high school friends who reunite to finish a pub crawl and find something amiss when they return to their hometown... namely that the townspeople have been taken over by alien robots. FOX411 spoke with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright about this latest on-set reunion and how the end of the “Cornetto” trilogy is really just the beginning of a new chapter in their story.
FOX411: How long have you all known each other?
Nick Frost: Simon and I for 20 years, and I've known Edgar for 15 years
FOX411: How does that help when you get back on set?
Frost: We’re very honest with one another. We all share a very similar work ethic and as much as we love working and we’re all aware that we’re there to work. Edgar doesn’t need necessarily to talk to us apart from [to] give us notes, if at all.
FOX411: Newbies that join this group, is there some sort of initiation?
Simon Pegg: There's a hazing, there’s a naked hazing. Eddie had to run through a gamut of abuse in order to become part of the gang… Martin (Freeman) has been with us from day one, obviously you see Martin for a second in “Shaun of the Dead,” he's in two scenes in “Hot Fuzz” and we thought by the time it got to “The World’s End,” what with him scoring a role in a minor global hit in “The Hobbit,” he should have a larger part so he’s a main character… And Rosamund Pike had to kiss us, make out with us for an hour.
FOX411: It’s the end of the trilogy, will there be more?
Pegg: We’ve always tried to make films that mean something to us on an emotional level. We always try to use these big science fiction or horror or whatever to say more important things about people, and who we are, and that kind of thing… Definitely we'll work together again, but it won’t have to be governed by the same rules we set ourselves for these films which is to have like ice cream and fence jokes and to be about growing up and friendship and stuff. We might make a film about two divorcees living in adjoining cottages making love to strippers
(Frost: It’s an autobiographical piece.)
FOX411: What about this idea of going back to high school and revisiting those days?
Edgar Wright: I have gone back. I think that’s pretty much where the movie comes from… I had done a pub crawl when I was 19 that sort of inspired the movie, and I think maybe in like early 2000s Simon and Nick came back to my hometown and we tried to do it again. And it was even more disastrous than the first attempt, and then on top of that “Hot Fuzz” was shot in my hometown so I had that experience of being back.
“The World’s End” is now playing in theaters.
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