Credit: Ray Burmiston
British film and TV stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost formed indie producer Stolen Picture last year, and with their first movie coming out this year, a TV series in the offing, and a growing development slate, they talked to Variety about their plans to take their inimitable brand of comedy and drama to the big and small screen.
Pegg and Frost are both men in demand. Frost will be seen in “Tomb Raider,” Dwayne Johnson wrestling comedy “Fighting With My Family,” and stars in AMC TV drama “Into the Badlands.” Pegg has a Paramount project in the works, will star alongside Margot Robbie in thriller “Terminal,” and is finishing the delayed “Mission: Impossible 6.”
But now the pair say they are “breaking free of our past commitments” and “eventually everything will be Stolen Picture.” At one time Frost thought he and Pegg would produce only movies, but the world has changed. “In terms of where the money is being made, and creatively, making episodic television is now no less nourishing than a two-hour movie,” he says.
The co-founders actually started out in TV, with revered Channel 4 comedy series “Spaced,” which provided a launchpad for Edgar Wright-directed “Shaun of the Dead” and then “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End.” Their first TV project at Stolen Picture is “Truth Seekers,” a half-hour comedy-horror about a three-person paranormal investigation team.
Each installment of “Truth Seekers” will focus on a paranormal incident, a setup with clear monster-of-the-week potential. “Each episode is going to be an adventure, a potential haunting or something,” Pegg says. “It’ll start as a very parochial idea, a very small business venture for these people, but it will expand as the series goes on to be something far more global. It’s a language everyone understands, the mystery of the unknown. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ was a very parochial story set in North London and somehow it managed to get this global reach because everyone understands the language of zombie movies.”
