Having been on our screens in many different capacities over the years, I felt like I'd seen every different type of Simon Pegg I was going to see. There's the lovable average Joe we see in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, there's the uncompromising do-gooder badass we see in Hot Fuzz.
He's a genius scientist in the Star Trek reboots and the later Mission Impossible films, and even more implausibly, in those films he acts without his usual partner in crime, Nick Frost.
But have you ever seen lean, mean, Brad-Pitt-in-Fight-Club Simon Pegg?
If that's something that sounds too much for your mortal mind to contemplate, then don't worry; we'll go into this slow. Ease your way into seeing it. It's a pretty big transformation. Dramatic, you might say.
First, let's try to understand why Simon Pegg looks so different: he's been working out, obviously. But why has he been working out? Well, it's all in preparation for his new film Inheritance, which is said to be a dramatic movie about the unexpected death of a patriarch.
Also starring Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl fame (I hate that I didn't have to Google that), Lily Collins and Kate Mara, Inheritance then takes that patriarch's death, and reveals he left his wife and daughter "a shocking secret inheritance that threatens to unravel and destroy their lives".
What could that inheritance be? Is it money? Is it a haunted house? Well, from the looks of Simon Pegg here, I think it's probably more likely he left behind a metric ton of protein powder. It's time, folks; I think I have to show you what Simon Pegg looks like now.
Are you ready?
No, you're not. I'm not ready, and I had to look at it to write you this article:
Simon Pegg's Twitter account (apparently someone moderates the page on Pegg's behalf) retweeted that photo of the actor looking all shredded from the account of Nick Lower, who's at least partly responsible for Shredded Pegg as we see him up there. Lower's original response indicated that Pegg had to fulfil a very specific brief for Inheritance.
"The brief for this role was lean, VERY lean. It required a specific body shape & look," Lower explained, and Pegg replied: "Also occasional mild grumpiness..." But it's on the Instagram post featuring Shredded Pegg that we can apply some cold, hard statistics to those rock hard abs, and be able to quantify just how Shredded Simon Pegg is.
Hitting the gym with "a mix of strength, circuits, core & 60km p/w trail runs" and sticking to "a sound nutrition plan that worked for him and his goals" (don't you just love fitness jargon?) Pegg reportedly lost 9kg (around 19 pounds), cutting his body fat down from 12 percent to eight percent in the process.
Wow. I... I still can't quite believe it. If you're like me and you're still convinced that Shredded Pegg is some sort of weird dream, then you should probably check out Inheritance when it comes to theatres.
