And the script's already written

Nick Frost is planning to star in his own wrestling movie

'I've written a wrestling film, so I think we're going to try and get that off the ground over here' he told American comic Marc Maron on his WTF podcast.

'I am a wrestling fan, I like a bit of rough and tumble and I'd like to do all of the wrestling myself'.

However, he added that he would have to make the film soon because 'I need to put a cap on it in terms of … I'm 42 now - 45 is when you start getting spines busted'.

The film is believed to have the working title Cockney Lump, and will be produced by Big Talk, who made the Dagenham-born actor's last film, the salsa dancing rom-com Cuban Fury, as well as Spaced and Mr Sloane for television.

In 2012, Frost told the comic book website Bleeding Cool: 'Cockney Lump is written, I’m tweaking it constantly and we’re just trying to get it out there and see who fancies making a wrestling film. It will be with Big Talk.’

As long ago as 2010, Frost suggested on Jonathan Ross' chat show that Simon Pegg would play his wrestler's manager, Earl Grey.

Frost – who is in the US to promote animated movie The Boxtrolls, which also features the voices of Pegg, Richard Ayoade and Sir Ben Kingsley – also told Maron that he had written a children's book that he wants to turn into a graphic novel and had been approached by a publisher to write a memoir.

But after spending five months writing his life story until the age of 23, he thought better of it.

He said: 'I don't think I am going to do it but I enjoyed sitting down and doing it for myself, it was kind of interesting.

'I wanted to write the whole thing and then take out everything I wouldn't want anyone to know and see what would be left, see if there would be an amusing story there … without the … shit.

'I'm not sure if people are ready for that shit. What they want is a story about meeting Quentin Tarantino or me and Bill Hader hanging out together … maybe what the publishers don't want are those very interesting autobiographies of the seventies and eighties by people who lived a life … that's what I want to read about. That happened to you but still you survived and thrived.'

Acknowledging that he'd experienced 'so much frigging tragedy', after the death of four of his six half-siblings and his parents growing up, he ventured that his outlook on life is 'what's the alternative? Just get up and keep going'.

Coming from a tough East End of London background and drinking in pubs at 13, Frost called himself a 'nasty' fighter and revealed that he was once beaten up by a gang of five and hospitalised before he became an actor.

At 18 he spent two years on a kibbutz in Israel, on the Lebanese border, after being 'told in no uncertain terms that I should leave London', though he declined to elaborate further on the circumstances.

Meeting Pegg at 22 when he was a stand-up, he told how they bonded at a house party doing impressions of The Young Ones and weatherman Ian McCaskill. And after driving Pegg to gigs for a year, he tried stand-up himself for 12 gigs, in the vein of Reeves and Mortimer.

'Six were good and six were the lowest point of my life' he admitted. 'And that includes burying both parents'.

Frost also confided that after 'spunking' away his pay from the first series of Spaced, he was forced to return to working as a waiter until the second, and that while Cuban Fury only made about $100,000 in the US, it was the most illegally torrented film in Florida last year. He also disclosed that after Shaun of the Dead, he was invited to play the role of Shrek on Broadway, but turned it down.

Earlier this week it was announced that he has a guest role in the Doctor Who Christmas special.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 23 Sep 2014