Bruce Campbell Is Writing the Parts He Always Wanted, and They’re Not Ash
Exclusive: Bruce Campbell explains to us how he's kept his career fresh after all these years.
| | On the set of his next movie, actor, filmmaker, and pop culture legend Bruce Campbell is in the midst of an epiphany. It’s the first week of his latest directorial feature, and his first dealing with a subject matter as elegiac as that of a widower fulfilling the final wishes of his wife. It’s delicate stuff, and the earliest batch of dailies have just come in. So it of course has to be right now that the obvious potential problem hits him like a thunderbolt.
“Ah shit, my leading guy is 66 years old,” Campbell grumbles to himself. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he likewise fails to suppress the smile. In this moment, and later when he recounts the episode to us in the Den of Geek studio at San Diego Comic-Con, he’s chuckling. After all, Campbell is his leading guy.
“I had to reconcile that,” Campbell muses, “thankfully it’s a story for a 66-year-old. It’s not me with boot black in my hair trying to bed some 30-year-old lovely. It’s nice to play an age appropriate role.”
In other words, it’s a very different Bruce Campbell than audiences might be used to. And at this stage of his career that has all the appeal in the world to an actor beloved at comic cons from sea to shining sea, mostly for the characters he’s played with boot black hair, chainsaws for hands, and a lothario’s smiling eyes. And when we catch up with him at San Diego, Campbell is as excited about getting to write for himself as he is for the many other splendid career departures he’s up to.
“Whenever I hear an actor complaining about how they don’t get good parts, I’m like, ‘Are your hands broken?!’” Campbell says with total sincerity. “Why don’t you click, click, click your way to a good part? I wrote myself a big fatass part, like starring from A to Z. And you don’t get that.”
The film in question is Ernie and Emma, a movie Campbell produced with his wife Ida Gearon and which has recently wrapped production. In the film, Campbell plays Ernie, a pear salesman who is left with some amusing duties and an urn of ashes after losing the love of his life. Campbell describes it as a bittersweet tale, and a peach of a role he decided to handcraft for himself because no one else would.
“I’ve been in Hallmark movies, right?” Campbell says while referring to pictures like One December Night. “It’s nice, you do your weepy little scene with Peter Gallagher. It’s all very lovely and wonderful, but it’s not the meat I occasionally want. And nobody’s going to write the shit that I want to write for myself, because they’ll write stuff they think people will want to hear me say [like] an Ash reference here or there… but the only way you can do it is put up your own money and make your own damn movie. So I’m excited.”
Campbell is excited about a lot these days. While he obviously has nothing but love for Ash and what he and director/madman Sam Raimi were able to accomplish with The Evil Dead and its progeny, what thrills him now is getting away from that at this moment in his career. Take, for example, the project he is in San Diego to promote. Like a lot of Campbell’s current passions, it’s a television series, and in this case it’s horror too. But the appeal of Peacock’s Hysteria! for Campbell is how unlike it is from anything he’s done before.
“I ask a lot of questions when it’s horror these days,” Campbell explains. “And I’m hesitant to even read something if it’s horror. But they go ‘read it,’ so I read it, and the words are what attracted me. I thought the writing was exceptionally good, like surprisingly good. And that’s the key, because I feel like if you have good words you can get real actors, and the audience will invest in those characters because you gave the actor a great part. And if you give an actor a great part, they might actually not suck in the show, and then people might actually like that character, because you rounded them out and made them into [something] real.”
In Hysteria!, Campbell plays the chief of police in a small Michigan town: Chief Dandridge. The actor describes Dandridge as a genuinely intriguing bloke, one he’d personally have a beer with and commiserate about life in the Midwest if they met in real life. Which makes him such a fresh part in a larger ensemble about the 1980s Satanic Panic. Within a movie Campbell describes as more horror-comedy, or “horror-edy,” Campbell gets to play a seemingly normal elder in a series populated by young people facing what can best be described as “Satanic shit.”
Says Campbell, “Ash vs Evil Dead is unrated television. This is R-rated television. This is not a splatterfest, this is a mindfuck—to the point where I couldn’t give the plot away, because there are so many twists and turns of who’s in and who’s out. There’s a heavy metal band in town. Are they linked to these strange happenings in town?” At the center of the mystery might be Dandridge, a guy who is a lot less “manic” than Campbell’s traditional oeuvre.
During our conversation, Campbell admits it’s a rarified list of actors who can truly take control of curating their careers. However, you can write for yourself, and you can keep it fresh. Again acknowledging his real-life Michiganian roots, Campbell likens himself to a factory worker in a Detroit auto plant. Back in the day, they’d cycle you through various divisions of building a car. One week you might be working on attaching the tires, and the next you could be helping install the windshield.
“It keeps you from going insane,” Campbell acknowledges. “For me, I think it was the same principle. Let’s try and do something over here. Okay, let’s go back and make another horror movie. Ah sure, [comic] conventions are going crazy? What’s up with that? To me, half of it’s out of curiosity. Let’s make a Hallmark movie, haven’t done one of those. Let’s make a movie in France, haven’t done one of those.”
On the day of our conversation, Campbell appears genuinely jazzed to see Comic-Con culture back in its full revving force. While SDCC has been on the rebound for a few years now, attendance was through the roof in 2024, and it’s up in some of the smaller, secondary conventions which are just as appealing to the man with the boomstick.
“I can’t wait to go to these secondary cons, because they’re doing very well too,” says Campbell. “People were held back years, and I thought, ‘Jeez, I don’t know if these are coming back.’ But it just shows you people like physical interaction. They might see [William] Shatner from a football field away, but doggonit, that’s Shatner!”
He’s also keen to draw a notable distinction of the experience for talent like Campbell while attending a secondary con and a spectacle as grand as San Diego’s Hall H.
“I think you must attend these big ones if you’re launching a show,” Campbell considers. “I don’t go to these conventions to meet fans. They have a brick wall between us and the fans, which is not great but it’s so big you have to do that. You’re not going to set up photo-ops in Hall H. It’s just not going to happen… but the outlets like you are here. So if you launch a show, guys like me are coming through every one of these outfits, because this is where all the journalists are coming for four days.”
By his admission, Campbell is here to talk Hysteria!, but he is just as thrilled to marvel at the spectacular growth he’s seen in the convention and television space. According to the former Burn Notice and Jack of All Trades star, there was a time where serious actors wouldn’t touch TV with a 10-foot pole.
“I started out doing Knots Landing,” Campbell recalls of a primetime soap he briefly appeared on in 1987. “That was my first TV job. You had three shadows on everyone’s face. And [the star] would look at the cameraman, Benny, and go, ‘Benny, good?’ Not the director, not the producer. And Benny would go, ‘Yep, looks good.’ And the AD, without checking with anyone else, would go, ‘Moving on.’ And as an actor I’d go, ‘Oh, my God, is that it?’ One take?! Because they were all out the door. That was my start in television, I didn’t do TV for five years after that. I had just done Evil Dead II where Sam Raimi would do 15, 20 takes. You’re sweating your ass off.”
Campbell doesn’t think this seriously began to change until Mad Men proved you could do high art on basic cable in 2007. Sure, there was HBO before that, but Campbell says even in the industry, that didn’t count as TV; The Sopranos might as well have been a feature film. Nowadays, however, Campbell says almost everything he watches is television with cinematic quality. “Movies are just guys in capes, guys in spandex. All the other stuff is on TV.”
It’s what makes Campbell excited to try new things like Peacock’s Hysteria!, and it’s what thrills him about the future. The industry is obviously in a state of upheaval again, and at a pace even greater than the cable revolution of the 2000s. But for folks coming up today, Campbell says you got it easy—assuming you know how to write and edit.
“I would say you’re a lucky son of a bitch,” Campbell says of someone starting today. “You can get on television in an hour. Get your own YouTube channel. All that TikTok crap. I mean, we didn’t have any of that shit. We had Super 8. We’d go to K-Mart and buy these little cartridges, 50-foot cartridges, and when it [peters] out in two minutes, you go buy another cartridge. Absurd. It was difficult, awkward, and strange. And then when you’re done, who the hell are you going to show a Super 8 movie to? No one. Your friends at parties in high school. That’s who you’re going to show ‘em to.”
In Campbell’s estimation, it’s almost too easy to break into the industry now—and all without ever having to leave Michigan for Hollywood like he did so many moons ago.
“I say to the guy in Butt-Crack, Kansas, don’t leave. Stay there! Make a cool movie in Butt-Crack, Kansas. I mean who cares? Put yourself in Butt-Crack. Get off your butt-crack.”
Like Bruce, get ready to click, click, click.
Hysteria! will be coming to Peacock eventually.