Actor Simon Pegg steps out of his comedic comfort zone to play a professional hitman in the indie crime dramedy Kill Me Three Times, which centers on a story of murder, blackmail and revenge in a small Western Australian town.
Of course, Pegg can’t help himself and still brings a certain amount of farce to the dysfunctional proceedings. He talks about making the film.
Step 1: Prepare for the role
Pegg: “Well, I spent some time killing people for a living. No. It’s all on the page, with this film, it was right there, and part of the joy of it was reading it and thinking, ‘Oh, I could so play this character,’ because it was a gift, in terms of it wasn’t a regular, nice chap, which I often play. It was a sort of amoral, very suave monster. It kind of felt like, yeah, ‘This is gonna be fun.’”
Step 2: Shoot a gun
Pegg: “It’s cool in the movie sense. The thing about this film, which I really like, is the fact that it is violent, but it’s a kind of theatrical violence. It’s hyper-real, it’s not hard-bitten, nasty, real violence. There’s an archness to it which makes it palatable and kind of enjoyable. We shouldn’t really lose sight of the fact that violence isn’t a good thing, but for entertainment purposes at times it can be, there can be a degree of enjoyment we can derive.”
Step 3: Set the film’s farcical tone
Pegg: “The whole film is like a catalogue of errors, made by these very inept people. Into which walks this very professional, super-professional, incredibly precise man, who finds it all incredibly annoying. Everybody around him is just, like, ‘For god’s sake! Can’t you do this properly?’ And it was fun to play.”
Step 4: Stretch himself as an actor
Pegg: “I don’t consider myself a comedian. I was a comedian a long time ago, but I’m an actor now, and dammit, I want to be taken seriously. But I think people who are perhaps known for comedy work well as villains because it provides an extra textural edge of likeability. You’re gonna make this person fun. Because evil is not funny. Evil is horrible. So, to soften it slightly with a degree of humor makes it something that you can enjoy and actually take pleasure in and not have to feel any kind of empathetic horror. Charlie is a professional. But there’s something in his amusement, and that’s our amusement as well, we walk into this town, this little beautiful Western Australian town, and we see this utter shambles of a community, all backstabbing and fighting and betraying each-other. And with Charlie, with the bad guy really, we all sit and go ‘Oh, my god, this is a sh*t-show.’ So, it was fun to play that, it was fun to be the rational, sensible side of the film, albeit… It’s a film made up of bad people.”
Step 5: Film in great locales
Pegg: “One of the best things about this job is traveling, and I’ve been to many, many places. I’d love to shoot in Italy. I’ve never been to Italy, which is one of my secret shames. As a European, I should have been there and I haven’t. India. I did a lot of traveling the year before last. I went to South Africa and Shanghai and Tibet. It’s always lovely to go to new places and shoot movies. One of the great things about shooting in Western Australia, as I said, was I had never been there before, and down the coast, Margaret River, it’s just such an incredible setting. And you get to do your job, but in a whole new context, and see great stuff. There are few places on Earth I wouldn’t want to shoot, apart from dangerous places.”
Step 6: Draw inspiration from other performances or characters that he has seen in other movies
Pegg: “I mean you draw on what’s gone before. I see film as a big, ever-moving sort of thing, and it feeds on itself and it’s inspired by itself, and things are reworked and redone and it’s impossible not to draw on what’s gone before. Stuff that I’ve done with Edgar [Wright], often we are actively drawing on what’s gone before in order to repackage it or at least reevaluate it. There are certain great performances that stay in your mind and you might subconsciously channel those people. I’m sure there’s a bit of Terry Thomas in Charlie somewhere, this sort of old British ‘I say, old chap.’ Yeah, it’s impossible not to. Because it’s such a gigantic and ever-evolving thing.”