Simon Pegg Defends the Outdated & Offensive Parts of Shaun of the Dead: ‘It’s a Joke’

Simon Pegghas defended some of the more controversial jokes in the zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead. It has now been 20 years since the first movie in Edgar Wright and Pegg’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and while it is widely felt that the movie has aged pretty well, Pegg has reflected on some of the more potentially outdated jokes in a new interview with THR. However, he says he wouldn’t change anything in the movie, reasoning that “it’s a joke.”

“That’s a really good question, and we did recently talk about that a little bit. Not least the joke when Ed [Frost] calls us the N-word when he gets out of the car. People often say, “Oh, do you regret that?” And I don’t, because it’s a joke. It’s a joke about how a clueless white guy has listened to too much rap music and thinks that that’s appropriate.

It’s not racist to talk about racism. It’s all about how inappropriate Ed is. It’s an important character beat because it tells us that he’s unreliable and not particularly trustworthy, that he doesn’t really have his both feet in reality.”

Simon Pegg Says He Probably Wouldn’t Make the Same Jokes Now

While Pegg stands by the more potentially offensive jokes made by Ed in Shaun of the Dead, he does believe that, were he and Edgar Wright sitting down to write the movie now, they likely would have left them out for fear that some audience members may have “misunderstood.”

“For us, that moment was always about demonstrating how sort of clueless Ed was about the world around him. Obviously now I get everyone is more sensitive, [you need to be] a little bit more responsible about how you throw that word around. And we never set out to offend anyone. But I would defend that joke to the hilt in terms of the function of it, how it works and what it means. It tells us something about Ed. It’s funny to see somebody be so inappropriate. If he’d said something else, it wouldn’t have hit as hard.

So, now, in the writing of it, we would have probably not done it, just because a lot of people would have misunderstood it. And I can’t be arsed with all that binary discourse online. It’s just boring. But I would defend the joke always in terms of our intentions, which were never anything other than to demonstrate the sort of blasé racism of white middle class kids that listen to too much hip-hop.”

Released in 2004, Shaun of the Dead stars Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, and Penelope Wilton alongside Pegg, and follows a downtrodden London sales assistant who finds himself attempting to rescue his friends and family amid a zombie apocalypse. Shaun of the Dead was met with rave reviews at the time and led to the likes of Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, completing what remains a fan-favorite comedy trilogy.

Shaun of the Dead

Release Date

April 9, 2004

Runtime

99

Studio

Rogue Pictures (Focus Features)

Tagline

A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.

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