Nick Frost - Psychos, Star Wars & Cornettos
From treasured TA fantasist and suburbia’s seminal slacker, Nick Frost is a man who does it all. Meet one of Britain’s best-loved actors, comedy writers and zombie-botherers.
Interview: Katie Baron
Photography: Perry Curties
Styling: Tom O’dell
Grooming: Joe Mills
Pleasingly, my interview with Nick Frost starts with some minor misbehaviour: a weird Zoom angle plus a serendipitously patterned cushion cues up the pretence that he’s in hospital having just had his appendix whipped out, an unlikely scenario I buy for at least a full minute. Such casually convincing dicking around is proof that although he’s now entered the spangly realms of Hollywood multi hyphenate (actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer) and starry projects like the new coming-of-age Star Wars’ series Skeleton Crew, in which he plays droid SM-33, he’s not entirely conceded to fulltime adulting. While now almost 53, in possession of numerous acclaimed roles, serious and comic, on both film and TV, the production company Stolen Picture (with Simon Pegg) and an ardent fanbase charmingly self-titled The Frostitutes he is ultimately “still mostly writing to make Simon and Edgar [Wright] laugh. If I'm at the premiere [of Get Away] in January and a joke I've written for Edgar makes him really laugh, even though I won't be able to see him in the cinema, if I can hear him laughing, that will be the best thing for me. There are jokes in there just for him, and others just for Simon.”
Dagenham-born Frost’s characters have previously been billed as archetypal good time guys – even layabout lad culture’s last men standing – but a quarter of a century after embodying the endearingly delusional, moustachioed TA reserve Mike Watt in beloved British slacker sitcom Spaced (co-written by then twentysomething Pegg and Jessica Hynes, directed by also twentysomething Wright) he’s covered masses of ground. Revelling in semi-autobiographical odd-bods, chancers and nerds (Spaced was loosely based on he and Pegg’s life as flatmates) plus a nice emerging line in psychopaths, his first writing credit was for survivalist TV show spoof Danger, 50,000 Volts! (2002) presenting tips for handling extreme situations like a zombie outbreak, volcano eruption or – stay vigilant – large windscreen-skewering poles. Like so many of Frost’s roles it’s completely of its time but almost unfeasibly funny now, too. Occasionally, it was also a labour of comedic love; for the post-atomic bomb episode he consumed smoked rat. Roles followed in zombie-com Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End (aka the Cornetto Trilogy); sci-fi adventure Paul (co-written with Pegg and lavished with SNL alumni – a legacy of Shaun of the Dead’s massive and enduring influence); inner city alien invasion story Attack the Block; underdog office-meets-dancefloor romcom Cuban Fury; unlikely partnership heart-warmer Kinky Boots; and Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, among others.
This year there’s How to Train Your Dragon, a big budget live-action reboot of DreamWorks’ 2010 animated film but it’s arguably Frost’s realness that gilds his genius – a slightly mouthy, on-the-verge-of-taking-it-too-far-ness that casts the illusion of relatability, combined with softer slivers of vulnerability, that have ensconced him in a multitude of cult comedy circles (“I am in a lot of Venn diagrams”). Consider the Horrible Histories cohort (he’s in the feature length movie), the Merchant & Gervais-iverse (see Merchant’s Fighting with my Family) and The League of Gentlemen (Reece Shearsmith who appears in both Spaced and the Cornetto Trilogy). He’s even had the supreme privilege of killing off other cult comedy icons – see Julie Walter’s Mrs Overall in Victoria Wood’s parodic soap opera Acorn Antiques who bit the bullet, sort of literally, when Frost’s armed robber shot her in front of Celia Imrie’s inimitable Miss Babs.
These off-kilter sketch show/sitcom legends light his fire. “I recently worked on Transaction [a 2025 sitcom about a transgender supermarket worker] with Doon Mackichan [co-creator of Smack the Pony] and she kind of gave me that same vibe I get when I work with Julia Davis or Kevin Eldon or Reece Shearsmith where I can just sit back and watch them do their stuff and it's fucking great. It's still exciting to get a chance to work with Julia Davis or hang out with Steve Coogan. You know, sex with Edgar and Simon is great but sometimes you have to keep it on the side.”
But it’s not been an easy road. The family tragedies he endured growing up are well-documented (including in his own memoir: Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies) as are his adult struggles with anxiety, to the extent it’s only in the last five years that he’s begun to believe he’s the real deal: “I had a road to Damascus style epiphany in terms of my life and where it was going and how I could change it.” Massaging scripts has been key, including TV series Into the Badlands, recent horror Black Cab, and even Skeleton Crew: “I think that one of the beautiful aspects of my career is that it's given me a voice, because I am a good writer I've been able to say to people, ‘hey, can I just have a little rewrite of this’? My scripts are chock full of drawings because it just fires me up in terms of thinking ‘okay the character should say this; this will be funny’. With Black Cab there was a great script; I simply made it smaller by making it more human.”
As an actor, some of the more serious fare has proved game changing. Playing dysfunctional commercials director John Self, a man insulated by raging excess, in the BBC adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel Money (2010) “was the first time I felt like a proper actor, not just the comic relief” while TV series Mr. Sloane (2014) in which he starred as a depressed accountant opposite Olivia Colman was a pivotal moment; the point when acting felt tangible, instinctual, almost transcendent. “It was like I was sat in a machine inside me watching her act and it was amazing, like the character I was playing was saying that dialogue for the first time. I still spend at least two to three hours a day getting the text into my brain but once it’s there… bingo! I can let my subconscious do all the work while I relax and follow my instincts. It’s a lovely feeling, like flying in a dream.”
Roles sometimes take their toll: “I'm always putting some of myself in. I think maybe that's why I find it quite a spiritually and emotionally difficult thing to do. You're always left with slightly less of yourself when you come out the other end but it's something you can rebuild. Once you get off set and spend time with the kids and your partner and you're back to your regular life it becomes refilled slightly.”
His favourite characters to date are wildcard dad ‘Rowdy’ Ricky Knight in wrestling film Fighting with my Family (“the real Ricky was just fucking fun and nuts and anything I could do he had probably already done it so I had free reign… it was great”) and – music to the ears of cornetto trilogy revivalists – the sensible “Andy Knightley in The World’s End, because that was the third film in a progressive look into how male friendships evolve as they get older.” The call for a ‘bronaissance’ is highly potent, topical territory, with the much-underrepresented focus on male friendship, aside cop-based buddy movies, becoming a much more poignant prospect when pitched against the blunt backdrop of Andrew Tate-ified toxic masculinity and terrifying statistics concerning socially regressive attitudes among teen boys and men. “If we do something else in five or ten years, I'm hoping that will be a look into how 60-year-old men behave.” How different might it be? “I don't think you'll ever see me and Simon in our sixties doing a film about skateboarding or drone pilots… although now I'm saying drone pilots, I'm kind of enjoying that.”
He does have some regrets (“I was offered a part in [Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist dark comedy] The Lobster – in hindsight I wished I’d done it”) but is largely sanguine about his opportunities, not least with the Steffen Haars-directed horror-comedy Get Away (which he wrote, produced and stars in) poised for release. Set on a tiny Swedish island it’s a tale, 15 years in the making, of insiders and outsiders with a major script-flipping mid-movie twist (“all done with an eye to people watching it for a second time”).
As someone who relishes a re-write and has coined more than a few catchphrases of his own, what’s the best line he’s ever dispatched, or served up for someone else? “At the moment I’m really enjoying Maisie’s line in Get Away: ‘Cocaine and fat dicks!’ [delivered just after the family’s daughter reassures Frost’s character Richard – her father – that ‘smoking weed isn’t her jam’]. It always gets a great laugh and makes me happy.”
Next up, another horror comedy is on the way (“but not as violent and gory”) and characters marked by stark dichotomies of light and shade, psychopath or otherwise (“surely a character is more human when they encompass every aspect of a human being?”) and family: “My legacy? I’m sure there’s never just one legacy but maybe if one day all my kids were sat round a table with their families having Christmas dinner and even though I was long gone they’d be sat around laughing about things Dad did. That would be enough.”
Get Away releases on Sky Cinema on 10th January 2025.
Interview: Katie Baron
Photography: Perry Curties
Styling: Tom Odell
Grooming: Joe Mills , founder of Woolf kings x and JMA, using Woolf hair products and Denman Pro Lab series and circa 1979