“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;