Simon Pegg and Nick Frost: Losers in love

It's a love story, simple as that. You can tell from the way they finish each other's sentences, the infatuated looks, the giggling. Simon Pegg is explaining how he and Nick Frost got together in the first place. Pegg's girlfriend and Frost were waitering in a restaurant. At the end of the shift, Pegg went for a curry with Frost and the rest of the staff. During the meal, Pegg made the noise Chewbacca makes in Star Wars. "Nobody else knew what noise I was making – it's the moment of light relief when they're taking Chewbacca as a prisoner." Pegg squeals "birbirbigut" in a high pitch and Frost smiles. "We call it, 'Beer beer bigot', if you're going to have to phonetically write this down." After that, they knew they'd be soul mates. "Nick was the funniest person I knew. Funnier than me. Which, as an egotist…"

Frost gives him a look: "Say 'I know'. Not 'I knew'."

Pegg: "I worked in the comedy industry and he was funnier than anyone I knew."

Frost: "Say 'I know'."

Pegg ignores him. "He's got a gift; it's genius, because it comes from somewhere you can't think about."

Was Frost aware of his gift? "Oh yeah. Always." He smiles.

Who's the more bigheaded of the two?

"We're both fairly bigheaded," Frost says.

Pegg looks affronted. "Hey, I'm the biggestheaded guy in the world."

Pegg has a theory about friendship. In fact, he has one about pretty much everything. In his memoir, Nerd Do Well, he calls it his theory of quantum attraction. "It's about the mathematics of fate," he explains. "I think what people mistake for fate is actually a logarithm of interests and coincidences that brings you into the orbit of people who are like-minded; that's how you make your friends." I think what he means is that you're more likely to make friends if you've got things in common. "And somehow we found each other and have been together ever since. I realised after two weeks of hanging out with Nick, I really, really like this guy. It was like a romance blossomed between us."

The pair are unlikely movie stars, yet stars they are. After the success of the spoof genre movies Shaun Of The Dead (zombies) and Hot Fuzz (US cop action meets Miss Marple), they have gone to Hollywood with their new film, Paul – a homage to ET and Close Encounters, with Seth Rogen as the eponymous alien. They tend to play slackers who have lost their girlfriends, their jobs or their sense of purpose – or all three. More than anything, their films are buddy movies. And they have managed to transform their losers into winners – of sorts.

"I have a great theory about the rise of the loser," Pegg says. "The genesis of it was the death of the 80s superman; you know, the death of the Terminator, which was the ultimate expression of masculinity at that time in action movies. The man had become so ridiculously masculine that he was metal. Then came John McClane, with Bruce Willis, an action hero who was a little bit flawed, who allowed us to see masculinity as imperfect, and that ultimately led to me and Nick being the lead in films. Or Seth Rogen."

So they are the new anti-action heroes? "No," says Pegg, "but men don't have to be inhuman testosterone… Michael Cera, Steve Carell, classic examples. You can chart the social, sexual growth of masculinity in films to the point where, like in reality TV, the ordinary person has taken over. It's loving the nerds."

"Yeah, wanting to give something back to those guys… " Frost says.

Pegg: "Let's not go into Jung. It's too early."

Frost: "It's Jung o'clock!"

Pegg has yet another theory, although it could be part of the same one. "It's all to do with our collective psyche and the archetypes and absolutes we recognise as what masculinity means. Everything evolves. It's interesting that women are only just beginning to get that – the female archetype is still Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox, the classic beauty."

Pegg, 40, is a middle-class boy from Gloucester with a drama degree (his dissertation was on Marx and Star Wars). He was ambitious and driven; he was going to be an actor, but didn't want to be at the mercy of casting agents and directors, so he started to write his own material. "I thought, 'I need to be autonomous, to create my own stuff, to self-generate', so that's where standup came in. I moved to London with the express intention of breaking the standup circuit."

Frost, 38, comes from a more working-class background, was interested in sport (he played rugby to a high level), but lacked focus and didn't have a clue what he wanted to do with his life. He took rugby seriously until he got injured and discovered cannabis. "I got to the point where I thought I could either be a sportsman and put my all into it, or not be bothered and drink lager and smoke the occasional joint."

They learned a great deal from each other. Pegg says he was inhibited when he left university, paralysed by his own political correctness. "The story I remember is somebody being fired from a feminist theatre company for saying, 'Shall I be mother?' when they were pouring the tea. It was that kind of era. I came out of Bristol University very much… Nick calls me Rick from The Young Ones. Nick had a completely different upbringing and was so much less pretentious than I had become as a student. I came out of Bristol not knowing if it was OK to call black people black people, and Nick was in the kitchen at Chiquito's making all the African staff laugh by impersonating the regions they came from."

"You had rats' tails and books full of poetry and an A on your jacket," says Frost, in his best Rick-from-The-Young-Ones voice.

Did Pegg really have an A on his jacket? He looks at me dismissively.

"No, it's a joke. Do we have to say 'irony'?

"Nick taught me about real political correctness," he continues. "It's about motive, not about words. You could be a fucking Nazi and still be politically correct. Look at the BNP, they're trying to get in by being politically correct. So I learned a lot from Nick about how to chill the hell out." Meanwhile, he educated Frost in the ways of the world. "I introduced Nick to the idea of feminism and consent and Raymond Williams. All that shit. We went to see a lot of films together."

So Frost didn't know about consent before?

He grins. "No. Or films. No, where I came from, you just knock 'em on the head or make 'em eat a cube of hash and pounce when they're asleep."

Soon after they met, Pegg encouraged Frost to make a go of comedy as a career. Frost didn't have a great time of it, and panicked when the audience heckled. Pegg is smirking. I ask why. "Well, he threatened to hit some guy because he was being a twat."

Frost corrects him. "Two guys. I leapt from the stage…" And? "I was thrown out of the club and never played again," he mutters into his beard.

Did that worry him in terms of where he was going in comedy? "Well, I didn't think I was going anywhere in comedy. I was just a waiter, and I was happy doing that. Then I met Simon and he kind of forced me into doing it."

Pegg didn't give up. Frost would create characters to amuse his friends and one of them was Mike, a sweet if psychopathic army type who loves killing. Pegg and a friend, Jessica Stevenson, were writing something they hoped might make a TV series, and Pegg asked if he could write Mike into the script, and whether Frost would play him.

And so Spaced was born. The comedy, which featured Pegg, Frost and Stevenson as flatmates, was surreal, childish and very funny. Their characters were, as always, geeks. Pegg's Tim is an aspiring comic-book artist obsessed with skateboarding, video games and Star Wars. He is miserable because he has been dumped by his girlfriend. His friend Mike, played by Frost, has been thrown out of the Territorial Army for stealing a tank and attempting to invade Paris. Both are sorry losers.

Two series of Spaced were broadcast on Channel 4 in 1999 and 2001, and three years later Pegg and Frost teamed up again for Shaun Of The Dead, a hugely successful low-budget zombie movie. Pegg plays the eponymous Shaun, another emotionally stunted man who is dumped by his girlfriend. His friend Ed (Frost) is even more of a loser. In Hot Fuzz (which, like Spaced and Shaun Of The Dead, was directed by Edgar Wright), Pegg for once plays a winner – with a twist: he is such an effective police officer that his superiors send him away because he is making their arrest record look poor. So even as a winner, he becomes a loser. Frost plays his inept cop friend. In the new film, Paul, they play Clive and Graeme, a pair of comic-book obsessives at a convention in America. On the Extraterrestrial Highway, they meet a joke-telling, pot-smoking, god-baiting alien, Paul. It's a sweet, silly film about – yes, you've guessed it – losers and friendship. It's not hard to spot the pattern.

"It's loving nerds, and being nerds," Frost says.

"Yeah, exactly," Pegg says. "And wanting to give back something to those guys."

Who is the greater nerd? Ah, Pegg says, that's easy – he is. "Nick's got a healthy interest in sport. I don't think you can enjoy sport if you're a massive nerd. I don't like football. He likes West Ham." He looks at Frost. "I am nerdier than you because I am slightly more fastidious in appreciation of…"

Frost: "…genre minutiae."

Pegg: "But you have no less a capacity to retain useless information."

Although they're a close team, Frost has until now been the junior member – Pegg had writing credits for all their projects, Frost just performed in them. But the screenplay for Paul, their first US film, with a semi-stonking $47m budget, was written by both of them. Does that change the balance of power?

"Definitely," Pegg says. "Before, me and Edgar [Wright] wrote and Nick came in as our magic weapon. Edgar and me were like the bosses, because we'd written the film."

Frost: "Classic middle-class answer. We're bosses over the working class."

Pegg: "And yes, we'd exploit his talent in order to make ourselves look good."

Frost: "I'll rise one day."

Now life has changed dramatically for them. Both have enjoyed individual success – Pegg in Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek, Frost as John Self in the TV adaptation of the Martin Amis novel Money. They are no longer housemates, no longer live close enough to drop in on each other without warning; both have married and were the other's best man. Pegg has probably found the change easier to adapt to – after all, he was drawing up his road map to fame at university. But both seem astonished to find themselves where they are today. They frequently name-drop people with whom they've been working or socialising, as if they can't believe their luck. "The journey from being nerds, or at least fans, to existing in the world that people are fans of has just been extraordinary," Pegg says. "And it's been fun to watch Nick, as I'm sure it has been for Nick to watch me, go from being 'Rick' to whatever we are now. A few weeks ago we were hanging out with Sigourney Weaver, and we both grew up loving her. We worked with Steven Spielberg recently and we both grew up loving him."

"From being a waiter nine years ago, I could now be in a restaurant and Spielberg walks in and I could get up and have a hug with him," Frost says. His pupils seem to grow bigger as he talks.

"Or I could email him or something," Pegg says. "See, that's the difficult thing. It's hard to tell those stories or express that sentiment without being accused of being bigheaded. But really it's just like, fucking hell!"

Pegg tells a story about Quentin Tarantino to prove his point. "In 1994 we went to see Pulp Fiction. It was the first time we'd been to the cinema together and we both really loved this film. That Christmas, Nick bought me a Pulp Fiction T-shirt and I bought him the screenplay. Cut forward to 2008 and the Spaced DVD is being released in America and Quentin Tarantino does a guest commentary with us on an episode that features a Pulp Fiction reference. It was so weird to think once we were there watching that film and now we're there with the guy who made it, talking about something we've made as a tribute to him." And, Pegg says, it gets even better. "Quentin has a picture of Nick in the cinema at his house in Mulholland Drive. He said Nick is the funniest man on earth, and that makes me want to cry a little bit, because I'm so infinitely proud of him."

The closer they have become to the likes of Tarantino and Spielberg, though, the more they have come to realise that it's all right and proper. "They're just people," Pegg says. "Spielberg was just a nerdy little film-maker. Same as Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and Quentin. All of them, just nerdy little film-makers." And this, perhaps, is where they truly belong – in the exclusive world of nerdy little film-makers.