On the Real Toby Young
At the Los Angeles press day for the film, Pegg explained his take on the real Toby Young. "Toby is a pathological self-promoter and he kind of loves it," said Pegg. "I think the whole thing in the film is the reason Sidney wants to tear it all down is because he’s desperate to be inside of it. He’s desperate to be part of it and because he isn’t, he resents it. I think that represents probably a certain cross section of the media whereby [they have] this disdain and hatred of the very thing they’re reporting on because essentially they’re not in it. There are people who set up these websites that just say terrible things about people who are, for want of a better word, celebrities. And then those people end up being celebrities themselves because of their doing. It’s like a snake eating its tail."
While Pegg does physically resemble Toby Young, Pegg's 'Sidney' is slightly goofier than the real Toby. "I’m just a terrible ham," laughed Pegg. "I must admit it was a nice change of pace to play the goof, rather than in my own movies I tend to write myself as the slightly more straight center to it and then cross to all the goofing around. That’s because I’m just so unselfish as a writer – I can’t help myself… That was irony, by the way. But in this I had license to just be an idiot and what better a way to spend the day?"
On the Script
Although Pegg is a writer, he says he pretty much stuck to the script. "'I've got c-ck on my hand,' I think is the only thing I improvised on the whole film. No, occasionally there was some room for improv, but generally speaking, Peter [Straughan's] script was really strong and neat and structurally intact so it didn’t really need anything added to it. That was nice in that respect. It’s nice to be able to hand the reins over to someone else and not have to have that production responsibility. I kind of prefer it when I do because I’m a control freak but it wasn’t necessary, really. Bob [Weide, the director] obviously comes from an improvisational background but the biggest thing he would do though, it was funny because it was his first feature film and he didn’t know he had to say, 'Cut!' The take would end and the tape would be running and the celluloid – you could hear the dollars just whirling through the camera. And you'd hear, 'Bob, just say cut!' And he’d say, 'Oh yeah, sorry. Cut!' Because he’s so used to working with video, which is cheap. But that was the only instance of his naiveté."
The Cast of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Celebrity Encounters
Pegg's co-stars in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People are two of Hollywood's hottest actresses – Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane in the Spider-Man film franchise) and Megan Fox (Transformers). Asked if time stood still when he first met drop-dead gorgeous Fox, Pegg replied, "For her it did. Megan did the film because she was a fan of Shaun of the Dead so it wasn’t like I had to jump up and down to get her attention. She walked on set and the air disappeared from the room. She is extraordinary and incredibly beautiful, but she’s also pretty down to earth and a bit geeky. She’s a comic book fan and she loves surfing, and she’s not an untouchable by any means. She was quite jet-lagged when I met her. I thought she was blinking a lot to be seductive, but it was because she was tired," recalled Pegg.
Pegg joked that starring opposite Dunst and Fox was a "burden" he had to carry, before confessing it's not a bad day at work when you show up on the set with those two actresses. "It was great and ridiculous as well," said Pegg. "They're both fantastic girls and it was a pleasure working with them. Both very different and Kirsten is so experienced, she’s been doing it since she was three. She has an enormous amount of wisdom and professionalism, as does Megan, but she’s very new to it. She's an ingénue. She's in many ways like Sophie [her character in the film], but has more integrity and more intelligence."
In the book Toby Young revealed details of his experiences trying to get past security and publicists (who he refers to as 'clipboard Nazis') in order to get into VIP events. Pegg says that, so far, his weirdest celebrity encounter involved another of his How to Lose Friends and Alienate People co-stars, Jeff Bridges. "That might have been with Jeff Bridges playing drums in his trailer on like the second day of us meeting. He bought some drums and he invited me into his trailer at lunch time to learn to play. And I did. He sort of taught me how to do it and then I was beavering away on it and he was teaching me to do the bending the note. And then I suddenly heard a guitar strumming and looked up and he was playing his guitar along – and we were kind of like, jamming," said Pegg, laughing. "So I went from not ever having met him to jamming in his trailer in twelve hours. It was quite bizarre."
