[imagesource:wikimediacommons]

Simon Pegg has appeared in five Mission: Impossible movies with Tom Cruise and has built a “very simple and amiable” friendship with the action man.

Hanging out with Tom with some regularity is definitely a treat, so Simon briefly detailed his experiences with the guy while appearing on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio show recently.

The secret trick to making his easy friendship with Cruise work is that they don’t ever talk about Scientology, Simon says. He figures it would “abuse my privileged access that I get to him” if he were to bring it up.

But the British comedian does tease Tom about his “ridiculous” superstar lifestyle, per The Daily Mail. The two struck up their sweet little friendship when Simon was cast in the 2006 film Mission: Impossible III, which is when he realised that some of Tom’s antics bordered on the outlandish.

Here’s Simon telling an amusing story about the time they were filming Mission: Impossible 8 in South Africa:

“I always make fun of him for it – the things he can access. Like we were filming in South Africa recently.”

“We were filming on this mountain in the morning and then he decided he wanted to go and swim with sharks. So, he flew us in a helicopter to this seaside part of South Africa and we had this bespoke trip out and dived with sharks and stuff like that.”

He added: “At the end of the day, we were driving back and going that was a real Tom Cruise kind of a day, wasn’t it? It was just a bit of a Tom Cruise day. He appreciates the ridiculousness of it sometimes.”

Imagine being so used to that level of luxury and access that you barely even acknowledge it as outstanding.

Simon also says that Tom is, unsurprisingly, a person who loves being famous and “really relishes it”:

He said: “He loves it…It energises him, and it spurs him on. I don’t think I would appreciate that particularly. I would find that very stressful and overwhelming and it would make me want to sort of retreat.”

Simon plays IMF technical field agent Benji Dunn in the longtime franchise:

Image: Everett Collection

The 53-year-old actor also spoke candidly about his battle with mental health and alcoholism, which took root on the set of his first Mission Impossible film back in 2006:

“You become very sneaky when you have something like that in your life.

“You learn how to do it without anyone noticing because it takes over. It wants to sustain itself and it will do everything it can to not be stopped. But eventually it just gets to a point when it can’t be hidden, and that’s when, thankfully, I was able to pull out of the dive.”

Simon who is now in recovery, also paid tribute to a teacher who helped him turn his life around back when he was a wee boy. Good on him.

Anyway, glad to know that Tom keeps his wacky Scientology beliefs to himself mostly.

[source:dailymail]