BRUCE CAMPBELL Interview: "This is not reality, and we have no intention of going there."

Earlier this week, FOG! had the opportunity to participate in a group interview with cult legend Bruce Campbell who returns to television this week as Sam for the third season of the USA Networks hit series, Burn Notice

You can read some of the highlights of the call after the jump including information on Burn Notice, ageism in Hollywood, and an update of Evil Dead 4.

Burn Notice premieres on Thursday, June 4th at 9pm EST on USA.

Q: A lot of your work has been in the, sort of what we call genre shows; science fiction, fantasy, horror, comic book –

BC: I don’t know what you're talking about.

Q: And I was wondering if this was a planned effort on your part, or just sort of happened?

BC: It's a little of both. You are guilt by association, so when my first movie was Evil Dead, that film was pretty successful and allowed a couple of others to be made and what it did is, it just sort of put me in the genre world, right from the go-get. I suppose if I had made a romantic comedy when I was 21 and that did crazy, then I'd be the romantic comedy guy. It's kind of how Hollywood works. So, it's material that I'm sort of interested in, though, too, at the same time, so part of me perpetuates it in that I gravitate toward oddball stories, some genre stuff, not all horror. I like fantasy and sci-fi and that sort of stuff, too, but for me, I guess it's the combination of starting out in the genre and then being attracted to certain material that could also be considered genre.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about what direction we can see Sam going in this third season?

BC: Well, Sam by now is, we're now past the point where we don’t trust him. He's a hopefully valuable member of the team now, and so, like Michael Westen, Sam is taking the twists and turns as they come now. I don’t know that Sam is going to get married or any personal revelation. Sam is pretty much living in Michael’s mother’s house, a room in her house, so he's just kind of a permanent loser, at least in this season. And he's always there to help.

Q: How is Burn Notice different from past TV shows you’ve done?

BC: Well, the making of television is the same, it's very fast. You're doing between 6 and 11 pages per day, which is a lot. Features probably do three pages. Big features do one page a day. So that's not different. What's different, of course, is we're in Miami, which is a completely out of the box thing for me because I live in Oregon, at the complete opposite end of the country. So it's different in every way physically, and the dynamics are different. I’ve never really done a spy show before, so this is a first for me. I did a western show, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., and I did a – well actually, no, I did a spy show, Jack of All Trades, where I played the very first spy, but this is, I guess, you'd say sort of modern day, realistic approach where it's not Hercules or Xena or something fantastic going on. What's different is also the subject matter. It's a fairly mature, adult sort of comedy/drama, with no fantastic special effects.

Q: How do you think that Sam compares to your other roles, and what is your favorite part of playing him?

BC: I like Sam because he's my age. He's, when I got the original script for the pilot, it said Sam Axe, who's 50. I thought it, okay. I'm finally playing a mature adult who doesn’t have to, he's an ex-Navy Seal, he's tacking around now, he's trying to get laid and drink beer. And I love the fact that all three characters on this show are sort of damaged goods.

Sam has his issues, Michael has his issues, Fiona has her issues, mostly anger issues. And he's a character that, to me, feels like an old slipper. He's not stiff. He doesn’t use all the same terminology. He uses slang. He's a little bit laid back. He's wearing Tommy Bahama all the time. And to me, I love the fact that there's a character who's that lackadaisical. But at the same time, he can look up anybody; he's got friends for days, he always knows a guy who knows a guy. So hopefully it's just a guy that you'd want to pal around with, but yet these guys are very tactical when they want to be.

And ... he's actually more similar to real guys than not. I’ve talked to a bunch of ex-police officers who watch the show, and they like the fact that we're capturing the human side of spies. Everybody knows James Bond, he's the greedy tough guy, but no one really knows what he's like, and no one ever really knows what his relationship is with his mother. In this show, you get to know that; I think it's great.

Q: Was that like part of your research for becoming Sam?

BC: With what, sleep with a lot of rich Miami women?

Q: No, I mean – yes, that, of course, but also talking to ex-cops?

BC: No, that's as a result of the show. You run into a lot of police officers who help us on the show, and they have buddies and buddies, and my ex-wife is remarried to a cop, and so I’ve been talking to him and all his cop buddies, it's their favorite show now because we do things in an unorthodox way and I’ll bet many police officers wish they could do what we do.

Because we don’t have to answer to anybody. We do things that are illegal but not immoral.

Q: In playing the character of Sam, you would know him better than anyone else, so what is your favorite and least favorite aspect of Sam’s personality?

BC: He's very loyal. He's not going to rat on anybody, even in the first season where you didn’t know if he was ratting on Michael, he never really did. He always just stalled the cops, so very loyal. And he is trustworthy, even though he drinks a lot of beer. His other traits are, I wish he could get a job and an apartment, and a car that he can hang onto. We're going through, like about every fourth episode, Sam gets another one of his cars wrecked. So he doesn’t even have a car, and he doesn’t even have an address, so I'd like to see, I wouldn’t mind some of that happening. But, whatever, I'm not telling the writers what to do. They're doing a fine job.

Q: Obviously Burn Notice has a lot of action sequences, do you find the action sequences to be the hardest part of each episode to film, or are they one of the things that are the most fun during production?

BC: It all depends on what you're doing. Fight scenes can be fun, but they can be very tedious and sweat-inducing, so those take a little more effort. I blew my hamstring last year during a fight scene, so they don’t have me fight as much these days, but action sequences are very broken up when we film them. They're little tiny pieces that get all put together. So with an action sequence, you just have to hope that what you're doing is fitting in, because you're only getting a tiny sequence of view, like looking through a scope ready to fire, or something like that. So when it's all put together is when it becomes an action sequence, but actually shooting an action sequence, unless you're chasing somebody, they're actually the least exciting to film.

Q: What is it like playing the comical one to Michael’s kind of straight man? It's kind of a pattern here, you’ve got Jack Stiles in Brisco, you didn’t really have anyone to play off there, you were the main character, the main guy. What is it like playing off of him?

BC: It's great, because he carries the show. I'm just hiding behind him, cracking jokes and getting out of there. So it's fine to actually be the guy who doesn’t, you know, Sam can be a little snotty, he can be a little snide, he's sort of a naysayer, and he always second guesses things that these guys do to make sure it's safe or tactical, whereas Michael gets involved from a passionate level. He's got to help these people, whereas Sam’s like, no, you don’t, no you don’t. So sometimes he's the voice of reason. But it's nice to have that difference between the characters, and Michael does have kind of his funny wit, a lot of it comes out in the voiceover that he does, but someone’s got to be the straight guy, and fortunately, it's Michael Westen.

Q: I’ve always gotten the sense that behind his wise-cracking, easy-going facade that Sam is actually tougher than people realize, with a pretty intense background of his own. Is there a darker side to Sam in his past, and might we see that touched upon at all this season?

BC: Well, you saw a little bit in the first season when he was being interrogated, you realize that he's interrogated people a lot, he's been interrogated, and he knows how to handle it. So yes, it's nice to see that there is a tough side to these guys amid all the joking, because I think that's really how it would be. These guys are tough on the inside but on the outside they're just normal schmoes.

As far as the dark side, I'm sure that Sam has killed multiple people. I'm sure Michael Westen has killed multiple people. Fiona probably has killed more than both of us. So, you’ll have to ask her about her dark side. Sam, I think, will go to the dark side, but he doesn’t stay there. That's not his bag. If something is horrible, it's horrible, and then you move on because the next day you don’t know if you're even going to be around. So I think Sam has appreciated a sense of life, by being so close to death.

FOG! Could you tell us something about Sam that the audience doesn’t know, that you know, maybe even the writers don’t even know, but something that you know about Sam?

BC: About Mr. Sam Axe? That he reads a lot. He reads fiction, because it takes away from the reality; and that his favorite book is Wuthering Heights. That Sam is a secret romantic. That's all I can reveal. I’ll have to kill you if I tell you more.

Q: Do you think there is any chance that Sam Raimi would ever direct an episode of the series?

BC: Sam Raimi will never direct an episode of Burn Notice because it's done too quickly. Sam is used to shooting these big, big, big, big, big movies, and it takes 100 days or more to film a two-hour piece of entertainment. We film these shows in seven days, so it's a real different mentality of features versus television. So I wouldn’t wish that on Sam, because it's actually a difficult challenge every week to pull these shows off, not that Spider-Man 3 isn’t, but we have a little bit of a different circumstance here.

Q: You do voice acting and you do live acting, like Burn Notice. What do you like better doing?

BC: I like a little bit of everything. I like, the phrase we used in Detroit was “job rotation.” That meant that you could do different things at different times. So this fall there's a movie, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs that's coming out. It's a pretty well-known kid’s book that they're animating it to be 3D animation. That's a lot of fun because you lay down a voice track and they create an entire world that you won’t see for months. I recorded this last year, and I won’t see it for a year and a half later. So that's kind of an interesting thing. You forget about it and then it comes back and you see everything that they’ve done to it. And you realize you're an integral part but it's still, you're a part of this big hole. Television acting is great. I like it because it's so quick; you don’t have to wait around. And feature film acting is a lot of fun because you can do very in-depth stories, but it takes a long time to shoot them, and sometimes it's more tedious to do a big budget movie.

Q: I heard that there were rumors of new movies such as, like maybe another Evil Dead, maybe another Phantasm, maybe even another Bubba Ho-tep, which has sexy vampires, so you could be good with the ladies. I was wondering if there are any other projects underway other than Burn Notice that you might like to get involved with or that you know of that you're going to be doing.

BC: Well, I’ll clarify a couple things. There's really no sequel for Evil Dead planned right now. We are going to forge ahead and do the remake; we are going to do that. There's nothing for me in the remake, though, do you know what I mean? That's a cast of young people. So I’ll be on as the producer but I won’t be in it other than playing the old guy at the bait store at the beginning. So there's nothing for me in that. Another thing to clarify, they're probably going to do a Bubba Ho-tep sequel, but it won’t have me in it. I couldn’t come to an agreement with the director, Don Coscarelli, on a story, so I think it's going to be Ron Perlman in that. And as far as the things to look forward to, I have another book coming out eventually called Vagabond, The Gypsy Life of an Actor, which should be out in a couple of years. And that's the answer to that.

Q: It's kind of interesting that since, like with the Bourne movies, there's been this great fascination with an explosion of films and TV shows about spies and covert ops like Burn Notice and 24 and, like I said, the Bourne movies. What do you attribute this; it's almost like a, similar to how there's an explosion of gangster movies, and everybody loves gangsters, and now all of a sudden everybody is liking spies, what do you attribute that fascination with people watching it, and what do you think distinguishes Burn Notice from the other works?

BC: First, I'd go with what distinguishes Burn Notice from the rest of the gang is that we have a sense of humor. Bourne Identity is very humorless, and 24 is completely humorless, so I think what we have there is a sense of humor to let people know that this is still entertainment. This is not reality, and we have no intention of going there.

I think people are interested in spies because they represent a heightened aspect of their own lives. It's the same people who want to ride on a roller coaster, they want to get that second hand thrill. So you go see a spy because you know he's going to be shot at, you know he's going to get sexy ladies, you know he's going to be cool, and you know he's usually going to succeed by doing some really cool thing, so it's just a certain form of entertainment that is very extreme. We like to see explosions and gunshots and car chases, and spies really provide all that in a very, sort of organic way, because that's their job. But I think we are definitely different between other spy shows because when Michael Westen isn’t saving the world from bad guys, he's helping his mother fix her garbage disposal. So that's a huge difference.

Q: Who do you think makes a better enemy, zombies from the Necronomicon, or the spies of Burn Notice?

BC: Apples and oranges, my friend. I would say zombies in general, I don’t think are that good of bad guys because you can’t understand them, like the true zombie, the shuffling zombie. You can’t communicate with them and they're too slow. Evil Dead, they're possessed people, not technically zombies, I guess. They're okay. I think spies are a better bad guy, meaning they're more challenging. You don’t always have to cut a bad guy up with a chain saw, you can just shoot him. So it might be harder to kill a zombie, but it's easier to get away from a zombie, and it might be easier to kill a bad guy like a spy, but it's harder to hide from a spy, because they have the tricks that you have. That's my theory.

Q: Between doing TV and movies, is there a dream role that you would like to some day tackle?

BC: No, only because I live in the world of reality. I know that Marty Scorsese, he’s not going to be calling. So those misguided dreams I don’t really deal with. What I really try and do is make the best out of every situation, because in B movies you're not always going to work with the top people, you're going to work with people who are either on their way up or on their way down. But that's where I think kind of the fun is and the original ideas, which is why it attracts me to that world.

Q: Do you know if Same Raimi has watched any of Burn Notice and if so, if he's had any comments on it? And has he spoken to you at all recently about Spider-Man 4?

BC: Sam, I don’t know that if he's watched the show, I don’t think he has. I don’t think he's a big TV guy. He's very aware of the show because I keep tormenting him that we're like the number one show on cable, and whenever we're number one in something, whether it's Sam is number one at the box office or we're, as friends, we always will send that needling e-mail saying “Yeah, man, number one on cable.” Then he would send something of, “Oh, yeah, Spider-Man, you know, we're number one for the opening weekend.” So we have a little bit of fun back and forth, so Sam is very aware of the show, whether he's seen it, you’ve got me.

Q: You’ve been mentioning the sexy ladies a lot, and I do have a question for you. Outside of Fiona, of course, who is your favorite sexy lady on the screens or TV right now?

BC: I'm always a big fan of Kelly Rutherford, from when I worked with her on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., so she's definitely babe-a-licious. Just a lot of women I’ve worked with in the past; Elizabeth Hurley, I thought she was pretty babe-a-licious, Alyssa Milano. That's the fringe benefit of being an actor, you get to, it's sort of staged infidelity.

Q: When you're off and just hanging out, what are you doing in terms of hobbies or things that just –

BC: What do I do for fun?

Q: Yes.

BC: Florida is really flat, so I'm a bicycle, not like a power bicyclist, I'm a tooler. I just take a stupid, I’ve got, I think it's seven whole gears on my bike, and my wife and I will just take off and go explore. They’ve got a couple good bike paths around here, so pretty normal, everyday stuff. I'm a news freak, because I live in the world of unreality, I actually crave reality, so my reading material is the New York Times, and I watch the news, and basketball, because we're in basketball season, so pretty straightforward generic guy stuff.

Q: On your blog, you really talk about how Hollywood doesn’t use its seasoned actors, like they kind of have in the past. How would you kind of work to change the perception of what audiences want? Not all of us are 14 years old.

BC: No, that's true, and the good news is that there have been a couple of shows that have busted through and appealed to a whole different audience, like something like Golden Girls. You can really make fun of that show if you want, but what that show did is, it wound up proving to people that even “old” people can be entertaining and can entertain you. So what I like about Burn Notice is that none of us are the young, pretty face. Donovan has been around for 20 years, I’ve been doing this for 30, and then Sharon Gless has been doing it for 40, and I think Gabrielle has been doing this since she was a kid, so she's probably 30 years at this. So, I like the fact that USA, because their slogan is Characters Welcome, they’ve really taken it upon themselves to do character-based shows, not something that's based on your age or your beauty. So I'm really glad to be part of a mature ensemble cast where we're not worried about all the

Q: You’ve been in all three of the Spider-Man movies. Are there any future plans on being in any of the future Spider-Man movies?

BC: I’ll probably be in Spider-Man 4, but I never hear from Sam usually until the last minute, when they’ve got everything worked out. So we’ll just see what he's got up his sleeve.


FOG! Do you plan on directing again soon, and would you possibly want to direct Burn Notice?

BC: Yes, I'd like to direct another movie one day. Movies are more my bag. I’ve directed television in the past. I’ve done Hercules and Xena episodes, and even a couple of VIPs with Pamela Anderson, but I don’t think directing Burn Notice is in the cards for me because it changes the dynamics of all the actors. Directors and actors have much different, I guess, motives and goals, and I don’t want any of my directing skills to impact my relationship with the actors, which is currently very good. So I don’t really want to boss anybody around, because I think it’ll change something, so I don’t think I'm going to go there.