Shaun Of The Dead Can Drink
Pegg and Wright’s Zombie Classic Hits 18!
This fact makes us feel very, very old: Shaun Of The Dead is now old enough to have sex, get married, drink alcohol (but only with a meal), join the army and erm, pilot a glider. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s neo-classic genre mashing Brit rom-zom-com staggered bloody and moaning into UK cinemas 18 years ago this weekend. It was the film that catapulted Pegg and Wright squarely into the global cinematic consciousness and was also the first entry in their so-called “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy” – a sort-of-series that also includes Hot Fuzz and The World’s End. To celebrate this milestone, we take you behind the scenes with Simon Pegg’s video diary.
Did you know that…
1) George A. Romero was given a solo screening of the movie while he was on holiday in Florida in order to (hopefully) gain his seal of approval. Wright recalls nervously waiting to hear Romero’s reaction: “I remember standing in my flat in Islington when I got the call from him, and he couldn’t have been warmer and kinder about the movie. I remember him saying that it was ‘an absolute blast.’” Later, in a charming tip of the hat, Romero gave Pegg and Wright cameos as zombies in 2005’s Land Of The Dead. The duo appear hanging in stocks in a “have your picture taken with a zombie” attraction.
2) Coldplay’s Chris Martin (who is a close friend of Pegg’s) appears twice in the movie. Once as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it zombie extra and then again in a fleeting moment near the end of the movie as himself, hawking a celebrity charity called ZombAid. Check out the DVD extras to see the scene as Martin and another bloke from the band (honest to God we have no idea who he is or what he does and we couldn’t be bothered to Google it) introduce two new replacement members of Coldplay, played by Pegg and Frost on a fictitious TV show fronted by real life charmless celebrity sex-texter, Vernon Kaye. Pegg’s “Simon Champion” explains that they only joined the band because, “we just love hip-hop. Plus Chris promised us a couple of handjobs.”
