The Real Reason Why ‘Shaun of the Dead’ Highlighted Cornetto Ice Cream
Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End all focus on unique characters in distinctly different scenarios. Nevertheless, the three films are widely considered to be a trilogy. Why? Because of ice cream, that’s why.
Famously, each installment of the “Cornetto Trilogy” includes a brief shout-out to the popular U.K. dessert. In a recent interview with Wired, Pegg outlined exactly how a frozen dairy product came to define their trilogy, inspired by one of the “web’s most searched questions” about the star.
“The Cornetto, for those of you in the United States of America, who don’t know what a Cornetto is — and I pity you — is an ice cream confection from the U.K. which is basically a sort of an ice cream cone, with a topper,” Pegg explained. “They come in (a) ‘regular’ flavor, which is chocolate and nut, or strawberry flavor, or mint flavor. And now there are lots of other Cornettos as well.”
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The ice cream first appears in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun brings his best friend Ed a Cornetto back from the local shop, not noticing the gory evidence of a zombie apocalypse all around him.
This scene plays out in the morning after Shaun and Ed get shitfaced at the Winchester Pub. And it turns out that this is the key to understanding why Pegg and Wright opted to include unpaid product placement for Cornetto.
“When we did Shaun of the Dead, Edgar was absolutely adamant that the Strawberry Cornetto was a panacea for hangovers,” Pegg recalled. “Like, if you had a hangover: Strawberry Cornetto, little bit of fruit zest, bit of sugar. Boom you feel better! So we had Ed, Nick’s character in the film, ask for a Cornetto the morning after a heavy (drinking) session.”
Wright has previously itted that he did in fact use Strawberry Cornettos as a “hangover cure” while attending art college. “I don’t know if there’s any medical basis in that idea, but I like to believe that it’s true,” he told Vanity Fair.
Pegg noted that the only reason they brought the ice cream back for Hot Fuzz was because they were hoping to get some freebies from the company. “At the premiere of Shaun of the Dead, we got free Cornettos. And we were just a bunch of young filmmakers, we didn’t know that you could get free ice cream,” Pegg confessed. “And we were so blown away by the fact that Cornetto would basically provide us with a fridge full of Cornettos. (So) we thought let’s put it in the second film as a reference back to Shaun of the Dead.”
“We realized after that, we needed to put a Cornetto in the third film, The World’s End,” Pegg continued, “which you glimpse very briefly at the end. We really played the long game with the reveal of that one.”
“So if you ever come to the U.K., get yourself a Cornetto, they’re really delicious,” Pegg advised viewers. Although he stopped short of recommending that they get blackout drunk the night before trying one.
