The first trailer for Simon Pegg’s latest, Hector And The Search For Happiness, arrived earlier this year. With the film due in a couple of months, a new promo has wandered on to the web in the hopes of capturing your eyeballs and raising your spirits.
Here, Pegg is Hector, an eccentric yet charming London psychiatrist in crisis. His patients are just not getting any happier, he’s going nowhere, and so he decides to do something about that in more ways that one. Armed with courage and natural curiosity, he breaks out of his sheltered life into a global quest to find out if happiness exists. More importantly, if it exists for Hector…
With Hector travelling to China, Africa, Canada and Los Angeles on his quest, the film also features Rosamund Pike as his girlfriend Clara, Christopher Plummer as a professor who specialises in Happiness Studies, and Toni Collette as Hector’s ex, who has settled into a new life in LA. It promises good-natured probes into the various ways to make people happy and a cast that also includes Stellan Skarsgard (who hopefully doesn’t suggest running around Stonehenge in the nude), Jean Reno and Jakob Davies.
Peter Chelsom called the shots, working from a script he wrote with Tinker Lindsay and Maria von Heland, which itself adapts Francois Lelord’s novel. Hector And The Search For Happiness will be out here on August 15.