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Tag: Simon Pegg

  • Simon Pegg: The Universe Gives Back When You Quit Drinking

    Simon Pegg: The Universe Gives Back When You Quit Drinking

    “You just can’t rely on any kind of stimulant to make yourself feel better and expect it to solve anything,” Pegg said.

    Actor Simon Pegg knew his depression was getting the best of him when his career started taking off, but he was still feeling down. 

    “I remember thinking, ‘Wow! This is happening.’ And at the same time I couldn’t understand why I was still feeling down. It was like, ‘This is all going well. Why don’t I feel good?’” Pegg said in a recent interview with GQ.

    Even as he became more successful, staring in roles in Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, he continued to grapple with depression and turned to alcohol to get through it. However, when he eventually quit drinking around the time he turned 40, he realized that life was better without the booze. 

    Managing Depression

    “What I found was that as soon as I stopped, things started to go my way,” Pegg said. “It’s a strange thing and I have had conversations with other people about this, that when you quit drinking the universe starts to give back to you a little bit. Maybe it’s because I figured out why I was drinking, which was to combat the depression and so I was able to get on top of what was the real issue. I spoke to people and got proper help. That’s when you realize you don’t need to get drunk because you don’t need to escape from things. By actually confronting it, my reward has been these last 10 years.”

    Although being sober didn’t make the depression disappear, Pegg was better able to handle the condition. 

    “What I have come to realize from back then is that depression is always there,” he said. “No matter what I did. I don’t think you ever really lose your demons. You just try to find a way to keep them in their place.”

    Now, he is able to do that in healthier ways, like working out, without trying to drown his troubles in a manner that never worked very well anyway. 

    “You just can’t rely on any kind of stimulant to make yourself feel better and expect it to solve anything,” he said. “At some point the effects wear off and you need more and more. And so with something like alcohol, you just end up being drunk all the time.”

    The Public’s Reaction

    Pegg, who first spoke out about his mental health and substance use challenges last year, said that he is happy his experiences can help others. 

    “I think I was just ready to talk about it, you know?” he said. “Before then, I hadn’t really been prepared to give that much of myself over. It isn’t something I think should be seen as shameful. It’s something that a lot of people suffer with. And what was nice was the response I had from a lot of people who said, ‘Thank you for saying that, because I felt that way too.’ And that’s what I would have hoped for.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Simon Pegg Details Alcoholism, Depression Battle: It Was Terrible, It Owned Me

    Simon Pegg Details Alcoholism, Depression Battle: It Was Terrible, It Owned Me

    “It’s like you have grown a second head and all it wants to do is destroy itself, and it puts that ahead of everything else—your marriage, children, your job.”

    Now feeling secure in his recovery, British actor Simon Pegg is discussing the years he spent hiding his drinking problem and depression from his family and friends.

    “One thing [addiction] does is make you clever at not giving anything away. People think junkies and alcoholics are slovenly, unmotivated people. They’re not—they are incredibly organized. They can nip out for a quick shot of whisky and you wouldn’t know they have gone. It’s as if… you are micro-managed by it,” he told the Guardian, while promoting his new film Mission: Impossible: Fallout.

    But one can only hide it for so long, he cautioned. “Eventually the signs are too obvious. You have taken the dog for one too many walks,” he said.

    Pegg’s secret battle with alcoholism and depression—“It was awful, terrible. It owned me.”—was even hidden from his best friend and collaborator Nick Frost. The two have starred in many films together, including Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.

    The actor, now 48, says he’s felt depressed since he was 18. He drank to self-medicate. “It’s like you have grown a second head and all it wants to do is destroy itself, and it puts that ahead of everything else—your marriage, children, your job,” he said.

    The worst of it—the “crisis years”—began during filming of Mission: Impossible III (2006).

    Even the birth of his daughter Matilda was not the turning point he’d hoped it would be. “It was the most cosmic experience of my life. I thought it would fix things and it just didn’t. Because it can’t,” he said. “Nothing can, other than a dedicated approach, whether that’s therapy or medication, or whatever.”

    That dedicated approach came a year later, when his drinking came to a head during a 2011 Comic-Con convention in San Diego. “I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere,” he said in a June interview.

    At rehab, Pegg seized the opportunity to get well. “I got into it. I got into the reasons I was feeling that way. I went into AA for a while, too. I don’t think I would be here now if I hadn’t had help,” he told the Guardian.

    Now that he’s come out on the other side, he’s more comfortable discussing the times that he struggled.

    “I’m not ashamed of what happened. And I think if anyone finds any relationship to it, then it might motivate them to get well,” he said. “But I am not proud of it either—I don’t think it’s cool, like I was Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll, blackout and all that shit. It wasn’t, it was just terrible.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Simon Pegg On Past Drinking Struggles: "I Was Profoundly Unhappy"

    Simon Pegg On Past Drinking Struggles: "I Was Profoundly Unhappy"

    The actor recently revealed that a past battle with depression led him to self-medicate with alcohol.

    English actor and comedian Simon Pegg has had a busy year, appearing in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi adventure Ready Player One, among others, and gearing up for the release of Mission: Impossible—Fallout.

    The prolific actor, screenwriter and producer is generally private about his personal life, but shared in a recent interview that he, like many others, struggled with depression and a drinking problem.

    “I was depressed. 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,” he told Empire magazine.

    The success of his TV and film career did not translate to happiness. “The more material success presented itself to me, the less I could understand why it 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 said.

    Drinking became a crutch, but that didn’t last. “I just drank more heavily… Eventually I crashed out. At Comic-Con in 2010—I’ve never told anyone this—we were promoting (the 2011 sci-fi film) Paul and I sort of went missing for about four days. I got back to the UK and just checked myself in somewhere.”

    That eventually led to the decision to put the bottle down. “I got well in 2010. I stopped drinking,” said the Shaun of the Dead actor. “I got a little bit of help. If you look at (the 2010 comedy) Burke and Hare, 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.”

    Pegg credits the crew working on the Mission Impossible series, in which he has played the recurring role of Benji Dunn since 2006, with helping pull him out of his depression. “They took care of me and it helped me to get out of this dark place and realize that life was enjoyable,” he said. “By the time I finished Ghost Protocol (the 2011 Mission: Impossible film), I was better.”

    The next Mission: Impossible—Fallout is due for release on July 28.

    Pegg discussed the meaning of happiness in 2014 with the Los Angeles Times, while promoting his latest film at the time Hector and the Search for Happiness.

    “It’s taken a while for me to get there; it’s taken me a while to understand what it is, how to be it. My own route to it has been an interesting one, and I think the one thing the movie says very clearly is that you can’t be happy unless you’ve experienced every facet of emotion that there is,” he said. “To know what happiness is you have to be able to pick it out from the forest of emotions. So you have to be scared and upset and miserable. You have to get all that stuff in order to truly be happy. And at 44, I think I’m there.”

    View the original article at thefix.com