Simon Pegg has slain zombies and defused bombs, but the “strangest” prop he owns is a fake nose he stole from the set of Star Wars: “It’s in a little glass case at my house”
It’s not uncommon for actors to keep mementos from films they’ve starred in, including props and costume pieces. But beloved genre star Simon Pegg may have one of the weirdest souvenirs around: a big, bulbous prosthetic nose from his appearance in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In the Star Wars revival film, Pegg portrays Unkar Plutt, an irascible junk dealer on Rey’s desert homeworld of Jakku. As described by director J.J. Abrams, Plutt is a blobfish-esque creature with a particularly distinct nose that takes up a good portion of his face, not unlike a blobfish that’s been brought to the surface from the ocean depths.
And according to his recent Reddit AMA, Pegg managed to walk away from the set with the prosthetic nose from the elaborate, practical make up scheme that left the actor fully unrecognizable in the role.
“I have Unkar Plutt’s nose from The Force Awakens,” Pegg confesses. “Unkar Plutt was essentially pitched to me by J.J. Abrams as a blobfish, and sure enough he has this weird, kind of like big dome head and this big nose. I think he’s a Crolute? I don’t know as much about Star Wars as I used to when I was a kid, but, I tore off the rubber mask at the end of the day and I kept his nose, and it’s in a little glass case at my house.”
For the record – and for Pegg’s own edification – Unkar Plutt is indeed a Crolute, an aquatic people from the planet Crul. Much like blobfish, which lose their actual shape and become the ugly, blobby fish that we all recognize only when brought out of the pressures of the deep oceans where they naturally dwell, Crolutes become blobby when they leave the deep seas of their saltwater planet.
Simon Pegg says there’s no sequel or reboot in the works for Shaun of the Dead, because the classic movie is “best left alone.”
