“MY AGENT SAID, ‘I don’t know if you’ll like this: it’s about talking animals,’” says Simon Pegg of the moment when he first became aware of his new movie, Nandor Fodor And The Talking Mongoose. That agent’s scepticism seems misplaced — Pegg, as Narnia’s Reepicheep the mouse and Ice Age’s Buck the weasel can attest, is a man who knows his way around a talking animal.
So, naturally, when Pegg read Adam Sigal’s script, he signed on — but not to star as the titular creature but as Nandor Fodor, a real-life Hungarian-American paranormal investigator who, in the 1930s, found himself on the Isle Of Man, trying to confirm the existence of a supernatural talking mongoose called Gef which had, apparently, rocked up on a local farm. “I read it and really loved it,” Pegg tells Empire on location, across a table in Leeds pub The Victoria Hotel. He touches on the film’s combination of faith, mythicism and existential dread. “Gef was obviously fake but made a lot of people quite happy, and quite delighted to believe that there was more to life,” he says. “Nandor was in this really weird place where he knows that’s not the case, but he desperately wants it to be.”
With fellow scientist (Christopher Lloyd) in the pub;
Writer-director Adam Sigal with Lloyd.
Today, Empire watches as Pegg — sporting an accent that has shades of Christoph Waltz — runs a long dialogue scene with Christopher Lloyd, playing a fellow scientist. It’s towards the end of the film, so we’ll spare you spoilers, but they wax philosophical, laugh, exchange wisdom and witticisms and clink their glasses together. At one point, Lloyd accidentally smashes his so hard against Pegg’s that the latter’s drink vessel smashes. Great Scott. But it’s a scene that, for Sigal, captures perfectly the tone he’s hoping to spread across the movie: wryly humorous, but with plenty on its mind. “It’s awkward to say this with Simon sitting here,” laughs the writer-director. “But the character fluctuates almost crazily between dramatic and comedic in the span of a scene, and that’s one of my favourite things about Simon. He’s been doing this at such a high level for so long.” Then Sigal returns to his monitor to watch another take, not a talking mongoose in sight. Or is there?