Nick Frost wasn't doing much acting before he met Simon Pegg, who included him in his TV show Spaced and has collaborated with him on Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the upcoming Paul, a movie about two British comic book geeks (Frost and Pegg) who encounter an alien near Area 51. Unlike their previous collaborations, Paul has Greg Mottola at the helm rather than Edgar Wright, though Frost told Movieline the trio is not breaking up.
It kind of felt like we were cheating on each other, but in a good way — a kind of sexy, duplicitous way. It's good for us all to go off and do other things. Obviously, we'll get back together. People enjoy the stuff that Simon and I do, but I think they get bored of us.
Paul is also the first movie that Frost has co-written with Pegg, though he says it's been planned for years.
Simon and I were really big fans of [Steven] Spielberg, and really big fans of The X-Files, as well. We kind of had the idea for Paul when we were shooting Shaun of the Dead, so it's taken quote a while to actually make it. We were shooting the scene in the garden when we were throwing the record at the zombies, and our producer said, "So what do you want to do after this?" And we just kind of came up with an answer on spec, and lo and behold, we made it a few years later.
Frost and Pegg got to be more than just fans of Spielberg in their other upcoming project, both actors got to work with Spielberg on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Spielberg's first animated movie. The process was a scary one for Frost.
It was really terrifying, since I've only been an actor for eight years. I was a waiter before that for quite a long time. Going from someone who didn't really want to be an actor to working with Steven Spielberg was a heck of a leap. I felt like a five-year-old boy going to college, if you know what I mean. I don't really remember going to high school that much, but I remember watching Close Encounters for the first time as an eleven-year-old and thinking, "F**king hell, this is amazing." Being on set with him and he knows your name, and when he's happy with a take he does a little dance ... it's a great way to work.
Spielberg has never used the motion-capture technique used to create Tintin, though Frost says Spielberg learned quickly.
I think he was basically learning as he went along, but his rate of learning and a normal human's rate of learning is a lot different. Most of the time, he shot it like you would any other movie. He would actually operate the camera a lot of the time — he was very hands-on. The way we shot it, it kind of felt like rehearsing a play, because we were doing long takes in a room with four or five other actors in gray suits. It felt a little bit like we were in the Actor's Studio.
Paul is scheduled for release sometime in 2010, while The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn opens December 23, 2011.