We’re next going to see mega-talent multi-hyphenate funnyman Simon Pegg have “a fantastic fear of everything” in, uh, a film called A Fantastic Fear of Everything, but he’ll soon go on a “search for happiness” in a film called, you guessed it, Hector and The Search for Happiness (ha, fooled you!). Of course, Pegg also has both the Star Trek sequel and The World’s End lined up before that (and, oh, thank heaven for that), but this is a news piece about Search for Happiness, so here we go.
News from Cannes (told you to get used to it) announces that Pegg will star in Peter Chelsom‘s (Serendipity, Shall We Dance, and yow! Hannah Montana: The Movie) film, billed as a “drama comedy” (perhaps a “dramedy”?) about a wacky London psychiatrist. Chelsom has adapted the film’s script with Tinker Lindsay from the bestselling novel by François Lelord. The film centers on Pegg’s Hector, “an eccentric yet irresistible London psychiatrist in crisis: his patients are just not getting any happier! He’s going nowhere. Then one day, armed with buckets of courage and an almost child-like curiosity, Hector breaks out of his sheltered vacuum of a life into a global quest to find out if happiness exists. More importantly, if it exists for Hector. And so begins a colorful, exotic, dangerous and hysterical journey.”
The prospect of seeing Pegg go for heart and child-like wonder in a dramedy does sound pretty special, and Chelsom himself has said about the casting, ”I’ve been searching long and hard for a film that would bring me back to my European sensibilities. Not unlike Being There and Forrest Gump, Hector is a contemporary love story, a fable wrapped around a very human hero’s journey. Nobody does the innocent abroad better than Simon Pegg: he is not only a brilliant comedian but a very touching actor. He is the Hector that you want to follow to the ends of the earth.” Aww.
The film is set to begin shooting once Pegg wraps The World’s End, which is pretty much just exciting to say. [Press Release]