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Q&A with Bruce Campbell: He’ll host his ‘Last Fan Standing’ at ECON on Saturday.

Here’s an interview from last week that we here at TDS recommend to Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead fans.

The fourth-ever EUCON: Eugene Comic Con is just around the corner, and this year it’s going to be bigger than ever, full of fresh programming and infused with new direction and energy, says artistic director Zachary Davis.

The pop-culture convention is under new management from Davis and his team at Imagination International, Inc., and they’ve wrangled a host of local, indie and big-name artists and celebrities, including actor, writer and director Bruce Campbell and his traveling game show, “Last Fan Standing.” Campbell is best known for his character Ash Williams in Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” movie series, which thrust him onto the Hollywood scene in 1981.

“I want to see what Eugene’s all about as far as comic cons go. It’ll be a whole new experience,” Campbell told The Register-Guard. “I’ve only done Portland. Comic cons are the new rage now.”

Ash and “The Evil Dead” have garnered a cult following, and Campbell’s lengthy career has taken him from B-horror movies and Syfy channel movies, to recurring roles in popular ’90s TV series such as “Hercules: The Legendary Journey” and “Xena: Warrior Princess,” to roles in all three of Raimi’s blockbuster “Spiderman” movies, and a co-starring role in USA’s seven-season TV show, “Burn Notice.” He’s authored three books and is now hosting a pop-culture trivia game show, which will be played on Saturday at EUCON.

The Register-Guard interviewed Campbell by phone Tuesday from his home in Jacksonville about life in the Oregon countryside, finally laying to rest his Ash character with the cancellation of TV series “Ash v. Evil Dead,” and his pursuits as a writer, a game show host and actor. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bruce Campbell: Twenty years this year. My primary residence has been Oregon for 20 years — not that I was here that much, but when I’m home this is it.

RG: Why did you choose Oregon?

B.C.: A lot of reasons. My mother dabbled in real estate in this area — she sort of retired with her husband in this area, and so I came up to visit and she faxed me some places to look around — back in the day of faxes — and this is about the third, fourth place we saw out in the country, and just the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

It’s mountain scenery and isolation and quiet. You don’t get that when you live in Los Angeles, you know. You go to work, everything’s crazy and noisy, and then you come back to L.A. everything’s crazy and noisy — there was no break. When I look out my window here, there’s nothing. There’s no lights on the mountain. There’s no noise, there’s no traffic.

We’ve been invaded by the pot growers now. We’ve gone from beer and meth as the local standbys, to weed and wine. So we’re stepping up. People with weed and wine have cash, and they tend to stimulate the local economy more than people who drink beer and do meth, with all due respect to our meth heads. Stoners don’t tend to go out and beat people up.

RG: Do you have any weird or strange stories to share about living in the country?

BC: Of course. The best reference I can tell you is my third book, “Hail to the Chin, the Further Confessions.” There’s chapters all about moving from L.A. to here — there’s all kinds of car crashes and drama and serving on jury duty. It’s a lot of simple pleasures.

’Cause my daughter is a California kid — born in Michigan, but raised in California — she came up here to visit. We did some errands, and we park at the bank, right in the lot. Go inside, there’s two guys in line — hey Joe, hey Ken — saying hi to the tellers, no ghetto glass — go outside, you gotta go to ... a place that’s usually busy, park right out front, go in, get our stuff and leave. She’s like, “So is that how it works in this town — you just sort of do stuff, and it happens?” It’s like “Yeah,” because when you’re not completely and utterly overcrowded, this is what life can be like. It’s kinda nice.

So I’ll actually never go back to civilization. Because my idea of civilization is the 24-hour available little toilets in my little town of Jacksonville. That’s how you know your town is livable. When they trust their citizens enough to have (those public bathrooms). Jacksonville is my last stop before I head out into the country, and sometimes those bathrooms are really handy. You know, lousy weather and strange times of night, you stop in there, heated, that tells me that the town trusts me enough to not totally destroy it every time I use.

But now Portland, I don’t think they have those.

RG: Now that “Ash v. Evil Dead” is officially cancelled, how do you feel about finally letting Ash go?

BC: Good. I’ve retired him. I’ve officially retired from playing that role — never done that with a character before. It feels great because it’s time to move on. I physically kind of got to the point where I can’t do that guy anymore. Hamstrings tear and they stretch, your eyes go your hearing goes, everything goes eventually. So I think it’s time to do game shows, you know? Time to put the chainsaw down — I’m a 60 year old man.

RG: Can you tell me a little bit about your game show?

BC: It is “Last Fan Standing” It is a game show for geeks. We’re going to ask how much does Thor’s hammer weigh? It’s not about history or geography, you don’t have to add a “what is” to the beginning of your answer. You just answer. And everybody plays. Everybody who walks in that door can take it on because they’re each given a voting device. (There’s) about 15 early questions ... and they vote. At the end we tally who’s got the best scores, we pick that clicker number and they’re up and running. We do two rounds of that, cook it down to two winners of each round, and then we do a seven question sort of battle to the death and somebody walks out of there with an amazing gift, which I can’t reveal. It’s too amazing.

RG: Why do you like being the host? Is it fun for you? Is it work? Is it both?

BC: No, I like tormenting people! You find out where they’re from, what these people do. We’ve had school teachers, students, college professors, tattoo artists. It’s really anybody from any walk of life, men, women, we’ve had some younger folks, so it’s been really fun taking it around to conventions and testing it out. So what we started doing this year was booking it in an actual theater like a performance arts venue, 400 or 500 seats and just doing it that way, like it’s an evening show. It’s a two-hour evening show, people realize they can have a lot of fun they can interact they can shout and holler because if our panelist can’t get the question — you’d be surprised how often they can’t even though they got up there — we throw ’em out to the audience, and I give out autographed “Bruce Bucks,” that’s fake dollar bills. Fake hundreds. So they still play, everybody plays. We’ve had some people come up, they got in the second round too. So it’s kinda crazy.

There’s come-from-behind wins the way it’s structured. My partner Steve Sellery, he’s the guy that first introduced me to this format, but ... he was doing it for military bases, it was all military trivia. I went to host a show for him so I said, “Hey, this format could work in my world.” It was really fun, these soldiers were all shouting at each other, and it was very competitive. I thought, “Man, you could do the same thing.” Three years ago, Steve called me up to see if I would host this charity show for the troops at the Fort Sam Houston base in San Antonio, Texas. And it was great. We had 600 soldiers, forced attendance, all in uniform. And this game just blew the doors off — these guys were acting like regular civilians by the end.

So we experimented there and I thought it could be taken elsewhere, and so we’ve been shopping it around, and eventually I’m going to try to get it made as an actual real TV show.

RG: So we might actually see it on air someday?

BC: That’s my goal. We’ve been honing it and refining it and tweaking it so we’re going to finish this run of performances. I’ve got three or four other cities to go, and then we’re done.

RG: So Eugeneans will have the chance to come out and see this before it really gets started?

BC: That’s right. Play it now while you still can!

RG: I heard that you consider yourself selectively retired, is that true?

BC: Selective — that’s a good way to put it. I’m not retired, it just takes more to get me off the mountaintop now.

RG: What kind of projects besides this game show project are you working on?

BC: “Lodge 49,” a new show for AMC, I just did that for their first season. I just did three episodes of that, and they’re back for another season. I’m not sure about my character, he’s mostly dead by the end of it. But you know, I’m looking for quality stuff. Paul Giamatti, he’s one of the producers, the writing was great, they just had really good people working on this show, and that’s kind of what I’m looking for. I’m not really looking for more movies for the Syfy channel.

RG: No more of those, huh?

BC: I think I’m good. I think I’ve done with my last “Alien Apocalypse.”

RG: What are some of the things you actually pay attention to and are interested in as far as pop culture, since we’re going to be at comic con. What are some things that grab your attention?

BC: Not much. I’m an entertainer. My job is to entertain. I don’t have to know what the answers to these questions are, and I don’t. I don’t know the answers to them. I watched very mainstream stuff as a kid. My buddy Sam Raimi actually read “Spiderman” comics. I read a comic called “Sad Sack.” The guy was a loser grunt in WWII. He was always peeling potatoes. That’s what I was more interested in, the stories of the average schmoe, which is why Ash appealed to me, because he had no special skills. He was just his guy who worked at S-Mart.

That’s what appealed to me, playing real characters and, you know, acting in modern day movies is a very special skill, it’s very technical, and I got tired of looking at tennis balls on sticks. There’s the monster! Now it’s over here — OK 3-2-1 — shake the camera and blow the thing and hit the blood! You know, none of it is just letting a scene play out. Whenever you have any kind of monster fighting or special effects, you go shot by shot, not scene by scene, and it can be very disconcerting. You don’t know where you are in the piece of this big puzzle. It gets a little boring.

RG: One of my favorite films I think I’ve seen you in is “Bubba Ho-Tep.”

BC: Yeah it’s a cool little movie.

RG: What is one of your favorite roles acting?

BC: Well that’s more for the pundits but Bubba was top five, “Evil Dead” movies top 5, like the Hercules and Xena character, Autolycus, King of Thieves... a lot of kids spent their Saturdays watching those shows. “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.” was a very brief one-off but really cool, ahead of its time, kind of steampunk western, so there’s been some fun stuff.

The longer you hang around, good stuff shows up. And you learn what not to look for anymore. And you learn the warning signs of trouble. Like when you make a couple of bad movies, you log in the back of your mind, why they were so bad, even yourself included, and you say to yourself, “OK, how do we avoid that?” But as a young actor you just say yes to everything. So it’s just a matter of being pickier now. Way pickier.

RG: What is the worst movie experience you’ve had?

BC: Well, it’s no fun pointing those out, but I would just say that it’s usually a combination... I’ll give you one example where I said no and I’m glad I did. Sci-fi script comes in. Tons of effects. Tons of action. You know, this, that and the other thing. So I say to myself, “OK yeah, you’re going to really need a journeyman director, that’s a lot of moving parts, to pull this off.” OK, who’s directing? It’s a first-time guy who wrote the script. Right there the bells go off. And you go, “First-time guy, who’s going to handle this...?” As my own director, I go, this would be challenging to someone with experience. And writers generally, in my opinion, make terrible directors because they have no sense of how a set works and they’re not great communicators because they sit in front of a frickin’ monitor all day long. ... Then I go, “OK, First-Time Guy, I get it. How long is this shoot?” And I know from knowing production what is a long shoot, what is a medium shoot and what is a short shoot, and they go, “Three weeks.” I’m like, “I’m out.” ... Because the producers now, now I blame the producers, they need to give this guy the most amount of time he possibly has. So that combo platter right there, I went “Pass. Just pass. Not interested.” So that’s what you learn. Years ago I’d say yes and then you go, “Geez what a ... fight that was,” you know what I mean?

RG: Do you think Ash’s ‘everyman’ qualities have maintained the popularity of the “Evil Dead” series?

BC: Yeah. Because people are shouting at the screen “You idiot, what are you doing?” You know he makes horrible mistakes because it’s not his job, he’s not a superhero, wasn’t born to it even though, in some ancient books, his picture is in it. So, it was fun to play the normal guy but then know that there were spiritual undertones, which is kind of cool. Because he is there to save the world. He’s been foretold as ‘The Guy.’ We were glad to be able to go back and revisit it with more experience, because the irony of my life is that I’m best known for the role of Ash in the first “Evil Dead” movie where I had no experience. So it’s nice to go back and go, “OK ... it’s 25 years later, I got some skills now. Now let’s take on this character and try and blow him into a three-dimensional character out of a two-dimensional situation.” So that’s what it was fun about it. But it was difficult because we’re older. Things tear.

RG: Well, it’s a very high-action TV show.

BC: Very much so, I had the hardest-working stuntman in show business, Raicho Vasilev.

RG: And you got to work with Lucy Lawless, how was that?

BC: Well it’s always great, always has been, for 20 years I’ve worked with her. She’s one of the good ones, as they say. Lee Majors as my dad? Who can top that? Frickin’ Bionic Man is my dad.

RG: What is it like having this celebrity status attributed to you as one of the most popular B-movie actors, what do you think about that?

BC: It’s impossible for me to quantify it. It’s not for me to say. It’s always nice to not wallow in obscurity — I didn’t get into the business to do that. But you don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s why you’ve got to be mellow about the whole thing. I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow in this industry, and it’s changing all the time: the way they make movies, the way they deliver them, the types of movies they’re making. I think I’m just going to enter into the game show phase of my career and see where it goes.

RG: What do you think it is about you that has built such a loyal fanbase, especially with the “Evil Dead?”

BC: Just relatable characters. You’ve got to have a character people will relate to. There’s some actors who will remain nameless who — they don’t let you in. Their performance won’t let you into their world. They’re putting up a sheen. And I think it’s all fine and pretty to look at, but you know, you got to have more. There’s got to be more to it, even an idiot like Ash. You’ve got to have more to it. That’s why we introduced Ash’s daughter. We meet his family, we start to play on a little bit bigger reason why he’s here, what his purpose is. When you look at someone on screen I think you want to go, “Wow, God, I’d love to have a beer with that guy,” or if it’s a woman, “Man, what a great girlfriend she would be.” Stuff like that. It’s just a personal thing too, and every actor evolves into whoever they are by a certain set of circumstances. Some good, some bad.

RG: In the latest phase of your career you’ve turned to writing books. Why become a writer? What is it about writing that you like?

BC: I love books because there’s no shifts. You make a movie, and especially a high-price movie, there’s a lot of people with opinions who are very bossy all the time. And they will hound you about the smallest little things, little changes, and they have to justify their positions as assistant this or executive this or sub-pseudo-quasi this. And when you write a book, you know, I get on the phone with my editor, and they go, “Hey this one chapter, you sound a little pissed off, was that what you want?” I go, “Yeah, I can tone that down.” And I’d tone it down, it’d take about 20 minutes and then I’m done and we never have another word.

I spent more time with my lawyer than my editor because of the (crap) that they care about. But the process is really great, it’s really rewarding creatively, and financially they don’t (mess) around. They know how to add and subtract in publishing. For some reason in movies they’ve forgotten the ability to add and subtract. It’s a much more straightforward — you call someone in publishing, they call you back. You call someone in movies, you know it’s like their assistant will get back to you a week later, and they’ll run by three dates of where they could have a conversation. You know, just call me back. So I like the old-school nature of publishing. It’s getting pretty modern, but the people involved are very straightforward. They’re in it for the literature, not for the limousines....

RG: So do you write at your Oregon home?

BC: Yes. I have an office that’s just about completed. I’m so excited it’s just about impossible to be patient. It’s a brand-new setup where I can get busy in 2019. There’s going to be a lot of writing in 2019.

RG: What can we look forward to?

BC: New book. I’m going to tour in 2020, it’s a book of essays, it’ll be something a little different. If you want to be a real writer you can’t just talk about the wacky times you got dumped with blood on a film set.

RG: Well that was probably a pretty good starting point, they say write what you know about.

BC: Now I’m going to write what I don’t know about.

#Bruce Campbell #Last Fan Standing #Ash vs Evil Dead #Ash vs. Evil Dead #Evil Dead

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