Simon Pegg talks about 'Star Trek' and playing a weasel in 'Ice Age 3'

Looks like Simon Pegg is going to have a busy summer. First up, of course, is his role as Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, out May 8. (“I saw it a couple weeks ago,” he says, “and I walked out of there like a wreck. It was amazing.”) But Pegg also tells EW he’s stepping into his first Fourth of July weekend in the threequel Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs as Buck, “a slightly unhinged, swashbuckling weasel.” For the new film from animation house Blue Sky, Manny the Woolly Mammoth (Ray Romano) and company stumble into a special, subterranean cave where dinosaurs still roam. “[Buck] is the only mammal in this prehistoric world,” explains Pegg (pictured, recording the role). “He had an altercation with this dinosaur he calls Rudy, in which [Buck] lost an eye, but took a tooth. So they have this Ahab/Moby Dick thing going on. He has perfectly lost his mind, because he’s been down there for so long. It’s always fun to play a loony.”

Pegg also says he just completed shooting his role as Inspector Thompson in Steven Spielberg’s 3D motion-capture extravaganza The Adventures of Tintin, which he shot with his Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz costar Nick Frost. This June, Pegg and Frost will team up with director Greg Mottola (Superbad) for Paul, a comedy the actors and avowed “heterosexual life partners” wrote together. “It’s about two British comic-book geeks having a little holiday road trip in America,” says Pegg. “They end up meeting an alien, called Paul. It’s a very intellectual treatise on identity in America — and aliens.”

Finally, this fall, Pegg says he hopes to reteam with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright on another of their genre-bending films, tentatively titled The World’s End. “If Shaun of the Dead was about leaving your 30s and taking responsibility,” says Pegg, “and Hot Fuzz was about being a man, then the next one will be about being an old man,” Pegg bursts out laughing, “being f—ing 40, which I am approaching. Edgar isn’t, the little bastard.”