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Leave it to the end of the summer for one of the most buzz-worthy final chapters in a trilogy to be released. On August 23rd, The World’s End will hit screens, completing the hilarious Cornetto Trilogy that includes comedy favorites Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. The Edgar Wright-directed films, all starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, goes out with a bang (quite literally), reuniting a majority of cast members past for a film appropriately about a reunion.

Pegg stars as an alcoholic sad sack with the gift of being able to talk as fast as he can chug. Convincing his successful schoolyard friends (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan) to finish the elusive “Golden Mile” pub crawl (consisting of 12 bars and even more pints) they couldn’t finish as kids, the 40-something gang returns to their hometown where a sinister, sci-fi secret is taking place that results in brews being traded for brawls.

In a roundtable interview with the affable buddies Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, the two talked about: sci-fi influences, their previous work, “researching” pubs, and Ultron.

Each movie in this trilogy has a specific genre element to it. Where did the idea for the sci-fi genre and the concept of alien robots originate?

Edgar Wright: In Shaun of the Dead, we wanted to put ourselves into a Romero film. A very much “what would we do?” situation if we were hungover Brits with no guns. In this movie, the sci-fi paranoia element is an amplification of an emotion. When I go back to my hometown and feel disconnected from it, I feel alienated from it. And much like [Simon Pegg’s character] Gary King, it is much more comfortable for me to accept that aliens have taken over my town than it is to accept getting old... So I’d say the sci-fi element is much like the sci-fi in the horror films we grew up with; it’s a metaphor for the emotions in the script.

Nick, you give almost two performances in this film after your character hits this breaking point. Tell us what it’s like to transform from an awesomely nuanced dude into a tornado of fists, feet, and barstools.

Nick Frost: I loved it, it’s amazing... I think that there’s a preconception that big men can’t get stuff done in terms of the physical side of stuff and I wanted to blow that myth out of the water essentially. But we trained a lot. Initially for four weeks, Bradley Allen, who is just an amazing stunt director, put us through our paces to see what we could do. He and Edgar designed these amazing fights. You’d come in the morning and he’d open his laptop and say, “Let’s have a look at this” and put the whole fight together in the rehearsal room with pieces of cardboard for stools. But the thing about Brad, he would say, “What do you think now? Put your performance in it.” We wanted to keep the character in the fighting. It’s no good to create a character and then to become a slugger when you start the action side of it. It wouldn’t work. We wanted to keep and maintain those characters throughout the fight.

I did a dance film before this, so I trained for seven and a half months to be a dancer. So I’m not sure how it would have been if I did it the other way around. I think the fact that I could move now and dance, I think it made those big, long takes quite balletic and violently beautiful.

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