Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Simon Pegg is a paragon of modern geek culture, not only for his Cornetto trilogy with Edgar Wright and Nick Frost, but also for his participation in—among many other fanboy favorites—Star Wars, Star Trek, The Boys, and Mission: Impossible. Pegg will once again sign up for fuse-lighting duty alongside Tom Cruise in next year’s Dead Reckoning: Part One. Yet first, he’s accepted a more realistic espionage assignment with The Undeclared War, a six-part dramatic affair written and directed by Peter Kosminsky (Wolf Hall) in which he stars as Danny, the head of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the organization responsible for overseeing the country’s cybersecurity. That position proves a vital one when Russia sabotages England’s digital infrastructure, sparking a covert computer screen-waged war that ensnares Pegg’s bigwig along with star intern Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) and NSA agent Kathy (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), who soon strike up a romantic relationship that further complicates their efforts to thwart the imminent threat.
Though set in a fictional 2024, The Undeclared War (Aug. 18 on Peacock) is fashioned as a plausible what-if saga about the perils of our new world order, in which nations are almost wholly dependent on digital capabilities and, thus, susceptible to targeted attacks carried out with a keyboard. Moreover, it’s a story about the cunning disinformation campaigns being waged by foreign powers as a means of undermining democracies’ social and political stability—an idea it addresses in believable and harrowing detail.
The Undeclared War is meant to unnerve in timely fashion, and it’s that aspect of the series that spoke to Pegg, who embodies Danny as the last bastion of calm and rationality in a conflict designed to arouse passions and incite rash—and potentially catastrophic—actions. For the 52-year-old actor, it’s an opportunity to temporarily leave the fantastical behind in exchange for a more true-to-life, and terrifying, high-tech spycraft project. Ahead of the show’s domestic premiere, we chatted with the star about deep fakes, online anxieties, the toxicity of contemporary social-media culture ,and whether he’s lining up a Mission: Impossible spinoff of his own.