Simon Pegg has been diagnosed with ADHD, and he has announced it the way he announces everything: as a character study. For years he filed his symptoms under “character fault.” That phrase sounds like a verdict from a Shakespearean chorus, and it has now been upgraded to a clinical label with a press tour attached.
The joke writes itself, and Pegg, to his credit, has spent a career writing it. He gave us Shaun, a man who sleepwalks through the apocalypse, and then spent the Mission: Impossible films as the nervous gadget man sprinting behind people with better hair. Now the tortured artist gets a new prop.
Does a diagnosis make the tortured artist more interesting? No. It makes him a brand with a therapist.
Pegg’s self-deprecation has always been his sharpest tool, and here it turns inward. The flaw he once blamed on his personality is now, quite literally, a personality. Hollywood has spent a century treating suffering as proof of depth, and Pegg has found the one wound that doubles as a tagline: “It’s just who I am.”
That sentence is short enough to fit on a poster for his next film, which is presumably the point.