Actor Simon Pegg has revealed he hid his alcohol addiction from his Mission: Impossible co-stars during filming.
Pegg, 52, started suffering from depression again in 2006 while shooting Mission: Impossible III, having first battled it as a teenager.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs how he used alcohol to cope – and things got so bad that he would go to any lengths to hide his addiction from colleagues, friends and family.
“You become very sneaky when you have something like that in your life,” he told presenter Lauren Laverne.
“You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped.”
Pegg also worked on Hot Fuzz and Run Fatboy Run before the birth of his daughter Matilda forced him to come clean and get help in 2009.
When he first spoke of his alcoholism in a 2018 interview with The Guardian, he revealed he entered rehab just before he began filming Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
“Eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive,” he said on this Sunday’s episode of Desert Island Discs.
The father-of-one attended Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober ever since.
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In his conversation with Laverne, Pegg also spoke of his friendship with Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise – and how he “makes fun of him” for being so famous.
“We joke about it. I mean I always make fun of him for it, you know, about the things he can access,” he said.
“He kind of appreciates the ridiculousness of it sometimes.”
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He described his friendship with the Hollywood star as “simple and amiable”.
When asked about Cruise’s personal life, he added that he “doesn’t ask him about stuff like that” as it “would be abusing my privileged access that I get to him”.
Cruise and Pegg are currently filming the second part of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, due out in 2024.
