Space. The final frontier. To boldly go where no man has gone before. And that includes scoffing square sausage on a distant ice-planet.

“When the Enterprise guys arrive I’ve not eaten properly for a while,” says Simon Pegg, “and in the script I go through a long list of food I want. I included square sausage. Unfortunately it got cut. But,” he adds with a satisfied grin, “neeps and tatties made it.”

Star Trek is back. In the $150m big-screen reboot from director JJ Abrams (Lost, Mission: Impossible III), Pegg plays Scotty, the irascible Scottish engineering whizz played in the original 1960s series by the Canadian actor James Doohan.

Alas, despite his efforts, even Pegg’s mention of neeps and tatties has been cut from the finished film. No matter. Another of his nods to Scottish audiences has survived.

“I asked JJ if I could say ‘get tae f . . .’. It’s pretty much one of the first things Scotty says,” the actor/writer/comedian notes with some pride.

“Obviously, it’s important to me that the Scottish audience accept me as Scottish. Also, half my family are Scottish and I want to be able to go there now and again without being booed. So I put that line in very early on, a joke just for Scottish people — because they’d know what I was about to say.”

Gloucestershire-born Pegg had some help getting his accent right. His wife Maureen, from East Kilbride, was on set in Los Angeles as his dialogue coach.

He also received pointers from Tommy Gormley, the film’s first assistant director and a Glaswegian.

“It was really strange hearing his broad Maryhill accent on this huge Hollywood sound stage.”

Abrams’s pacy, 130-minute blockbuster is a coming-of-age story. It just so happens that the film’s heroes — the fresh-faced James T Kirk and Spock, not long graduated from Starfleet Academy — come of age while facing off against rampaging, planet-destroying, time-travelling Romulans piloting a spacecraft bristling with evil-looking appendages. (Imagine a robo-lobster with really big lasers. Then paint it black. Star Trek’s production design is superb. And, yes, the female crew on the Starship Enterprise still wear miniskirts.)

“JJ has stripped the story back to Iowa, where Jim Kirk came from,” says Pegg. “It is similar in some respects to the original Star Wars — the classic hero’s journey from simple farm boy to responsible man leading a group of people in space. The heart of Star Trek was always that — and to some degree that was because in the Sixties they couldn’t afford the special effects that JJ could.”

Star Trek represents a big leap forward in the career of 39-year-old Pegg. He started acting at school but first tried stand-up comedy as a student at Bristol University, performing with David Walliams of Little Britain and Dominik Diamond, the Scottish DJ and television presenter.