Nick Frost and Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz Courtesy of Rogue Pictures

You are most famous for your broad British comedies with Nick Frost, so it is pretty revelatory to see you in more dramatic roles like The Good Night. Is that something you will seek out in the future?
Yeah, I'd like to. So far I have not done anything yet that is bang-on serious all the way. Even in The Good Night, I am the comedic character. But the way that Edgar [Wright, Pegg's screenplay collaborator] and I write — like with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz — we try to play it straight and write the comedy into the situation rather than gag-to-gag humor. So for instance in Shaun of the Dead, when we came to the sequence where Shaun has to shoot his own mother, we realized very quickly that because it had taken such a long time to set these characters up and make the audience care about them, that [action] could not be passed off as a kind of "'Bye Mum!' Bang!" It had to painful for Shaun and it had to be difficult for the audience to watch. If you take that scene out of Shaun of the Dead, even though it is peppered with little jokes, it is a pretty serious scene. So I think the leap from that to doing a dramatic role isn't as big as it might seem.

Do you think there is a shift in the way that comedy has been moving over the last few years? It seems to be less about sight gags, pratfalls and slipping-on-banana-peels, and more about people playing it dead straight in slightly absurd situations?
Comedy evolves. It is an extremely organic form of expression. It relies on people trying to illicit an immediate emotional response. As a stand-up comic you are at the very edge of live performance because you are validated the second you finish speaking. Stand-up has got really impatient, insecure people. You want to be validated right now. Because of that, it does evolve and become different things. And at the moment there is definitely a movement in comedy that is partly [inspired by] the hilarity of genuine, real life. But at the same time, crass comedy is out there — those kind of easy parody movies that just recreate scenes from other films — [which is] slightly more dumb kind of stuff. But I just watched Superbad and I thought that was a great combination of real frat boy gross-out [comedy] with a little bit more of sensitive reality.