Source: NYT
BRUCE CAMPBELL, who has spent much of his cult-adored B-movie acting career fighting monsters, wielding chain saws and covered in blood-colored gunk, doesn’t stay in your fancy-pants movie-star Beverly Hills hotels when he’s got show business work to do. He stays out in the valley, at the Sportsmen’s Lodge on Ventura Boulevard, where the pool is surrounded by AstroTurf and the coffee shop servers, rather than waiting to be discovered, are actually interested in bringing you food.
“I’ll have iced tea in a dirty glass,” Mr. Campbell said on a recent Thursday, plopping himself down in a corner booth, looking comfortable in every way, wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops and a loose-fitting Tommy Bahama shirt. That he finds himself on a hit television series at the age of 50 — playing big-lug sidekick to Jeffrey Donovan on “Burn Notice” — is an unexpected windfall for the lantern-jawed Mr. Campbell, best known as a horror-film hero since he starred in his childhood pal Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” trilogy in the early 1980s.
“Burn Notice,” a breezy summer spy romp on the USA Network, is the kind of regular gig Mr. Campbell long ago stopped pursuing, deciding that instead of chasing stardom in Los Angeles he’d rather make his own movies, write a few books and basically not get involved in anything that would interfere with his ability to hang out on his middle-of-nowhere property, a lavender farm outside Ashland, Ore.
“All my neighbors are loggers and ranchers and tough guys,” he said. “One of them has a sign on his property that’s a big picture of a shotgun pointing at you, and it says, ‘We don’t call 911.’ I’m a fairly antisocial hermit type. So I like it up there.”
But he hasn’t been there much lately. Besides working on “Burn Notice” in Miami (where, he claims, he’s prone to “projectile sweating”), he’s been out on the hustings, finishing postproduction and greasing the promotional wheels for his next film, an indie horror-comedy called “My Name Is Bruce,” scheduled to open in October. He directed it and stars as a legendary B-movie actor named Bruce Campbell, who turns out to be a liquored-up jerk who ends up battling a nine-foot-tall sword-wielding Chinese god of war (and of bean curd) to save a small town. It is not a true story.
A recent screening of footage from the film, which has been long delayed (“Because,” he explained, “low-budget movies aren’t released, they escape”), at Comic-Con International in San Diego drew roars of approval, with one fan loudly proclaiming Mr. Campbell his favorite actor, ever. After which Mr. Campbell opened his wallet and gave the guy $2.
He’s just now starting to get recognized as “that guy from ‘Burn Notice,’ ” Mr. Campbell said, acknowledging that a lot of his horror-film fan base might not have immediately latched on to the much tamer cable series, which has plenty of fight scenes and exploding cars but none of the comedic ultraviolence that characterizes films like “Army of Darkness” and “Maniac Cop.”
“A lot of the people who follow what I do only want to see me do certain things,” he said, not complaining. Some of his fans, he said, want to know why his “Burn Notice” character, a low-key former F.B.I. operative, doesn’t have more fight scenes. “I’ve been trying,” he said, “but three or four weeks ago I was trying to kick a stuntman in the face and blew my hamstring. It was two days after I turned 50. I must have reached my expiration date.”
Mr. Campbell and Mr. Raimi, the “Evil Dead” director — now better known for the “Spider-Man” films, in all of which Mr. Campbell has a bit part — attended high school together in suburban Detroit, and after “The Evil Dead” got both of them noticed, Mr. Campbell, with his masculine looks and comedic inclinations, seemed poised for a traditional Hollywood action-hero career. He moved to Los Angeles in 1988, did his share of TV drama guest shots, and had recurring roles on “Xena” and “Hercules” and his own series on Fox in 1993, “The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr.” But he was always just a little too twisted to be a leading man.
“I’m not interested in playing the straightforward square-jawed type. I never was,” he said. “I’d be doing soap operas and hourlong dramas right now if I was really into that. But I was always looking for stuff that was more off-kilter.”
Matt Nix, the creator and executive producer of “Burn Notice,” said he had “no doubt that he could have had a giant action-star career.” Mr. Nix cast Mr. Campbell, he said, because he was looking for “an actor who looks like somebody who could not only take a punch but take a punch and enjoy it.
“There’s a slight wink in his performances, something that’s always going to be a little offbeat. Some of the audience is going to wonder if there’s a joke they’re not getting, but if you love Bruce Campbell, that’s what makes you love him. You feel like you’re in on it. You feel like he’s your buddy up there.”
Mr. Campbell said: “The thing about ‘Burn Notice’ is that all the characters are damaged goods. I like that. And I love the fact that we’re all adults, that none of us are young. It’s an adult show. It’s not made for kids.”
Pleased as he is with the attention, and the steady work, Mr. Campbell admitted that there are days when he remembers why he has avoided taking parts in television series over the years. “For five years you’re trapped like a rat, in this lovely cage with silky paper on the bottom of it and a golden door that’s always locked,” he said. “Everyone takes good care of you, but you can’t go anywhere.”
