Simon Pegg Explains How His 'Star Wars' Role Made Him Sweat

Being part of Star Wars comes with a lot of pressure. The massively popular franchise is a lot to live up to, but for Simon Pegg, it wasn't the weight of being part of the Star Wars universe that made him sweat.

Pegg recently appeared on The Graham Norton Show where he talked about achieving the ultimate nerdy hat-trick -- appearing in Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars -- but he also revealed that his role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens made him sweat. Literally. The actor, who was completely unrecognizable as a junk boss on Jakku who tries to steal BB-8 from Rey (Daisy Ridley) when she refuses to sell the droid but is interrupted by a First Order attack on Niima Outpost, explained that it was his costume that made things very sweaty.

"Unkar Plutt. He was a junk dealer on the planet Jakku and I was wearing that in 50-degree heat [122 degrees Fahrenheit] and I had these big rubber-like silicone guantlets on my fingers and when I took them off I could pour the sweat out," Pegg said.

That the role was so hot and uncomfortable for Pegg should come as no surprise when one considers where the scenes on Jakku were filmed. The home world of Rey, Jakku is a harsh and inhospitable desert planet far on the outskirts of the galaxy. To capture the harshness of that world, scenes for Jakku were filmed in the Rub' al Khali desert near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The desert, whose name means "the empty quarter" in Arabic, has a daily average high temperature of 117 degrees Fahrenheit and can get hot as 124 degrees. In that kind of heat no costume was likely comfortable, though being covered in silicone had to be particularly miserable. Pegg found the humor in it, however, or at least something educational about the experience.

"And, if you're interested, you're sweat is a kind of milky color," Pegg said.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is now playing in theaters