Bruce almighty

Hello there. I’m Bruce Campbell. We’re back.”

Now that’s what we call an opening gambit. In a world where wars might break out if we were forced to name the Greatest A-lister of Them All, few would find cause to bicker over the Greatest B-lister. That honour falls, hands down, no contest, to one Bruce Lorne Campbell, the legendary star of The Evil Dead trilogy.
Who in hell would want to be Brad Pitt when you could be Bruce Campbell? Not us. And certainly not Bruce Campbell.
“Nobody is rooting through my garbage,” notes Mr. Campbell. “Nobody is hiding outside my house with a telescopic lens. Nobody is twisting my words into some BS about Jennifer Aniston. That’s got to be hell. I think the only saving grace of being an A-list movie star is that you can sue these bastards for huge amounts of money, then hand the cheque over to charity. It’s a nice way to say ’fuck you’.”
With his chiselled comic-book hero looks and his Detroit deadpan, it’s difficult to imagine a world in which Bruce Campbell was not a successful B-list mega-star. Still, the 50 year-old icon admits, B-list mega-stardom isn‘t quite what it used to be.
“The definition is shifting all the time,” he says. “If we’re being purists about it, then The Dark Knight is a B-movie. You’ve got a guy dressed up as a bat, flying around Gotham City and chasing a guy called The Joker. Sorry folks, but that’s a B-movie right there. If you develop super powers after getting bitten by a radioactive Spider, then you’re in a ‘50s B-movie. Look at Transformers. Look at Iron Man. It’s ironic, but all the big movies now are B-movies.”
Mr. Campbell, it hardly needs to be said, got there long before the zeitgeist. More than three decades ago, he and brothers Sam and Ted Raimi began shooting Super-8 short films around the campus of Wylie E. Groves High School in their home state of Michigan. Following a stint in West Michigan University, Sam and Bruce scraped together the necessaries for the first no-fi instalment of The Evil Dead trilogy. It was the beginning of a beautiful creative friendship that has lasted into Mr. Raimi’s Spiderman years and beyond.
“Sam Raimi is the same old guy, even now,” says Mr. Campbell. “He was a big bully as a kid. And he’s still a big bully. Seriously, I’m so thrilled for him. When we were kids, we could never afford Sam’s ideas. Now, he imagines a shot and there’s a hundred people shouting ’make this happen’. He’s a big A-list director. It’s hilarious. I remember on the Spiderman set Sam called me into a corner and said ‘Isn’t this the same shit we’ve been making since we were kids? Can you believe we’re getting away with this?’”
During the intervening years, Mr. Campbell has struck out on his own as a diarist, a best selling po-mo novelist and an occasional Coen Brothers player. He has, to date, appeared in The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, but admits that he finds film’s pre-eminent siblings as mysterious as ever.
“They are, without doubt, the most enigmatic people I’ve ever worked with,” says the actor. “They direct in tandem. And they pace all the time. People at conventions are always asking me when I’m doing a movie with them again. But the Coens are completely unique. There’s no point trying to predict what they’ll do or when they‘ll come a-calling.”
Despite these flirtations with respectability Bruce Campbell remains a B-movie god, the guy we root for in box-office catastrophes like McHale’s Army and Escape from LA as well as distinguished bottom-shelf premieres Maniac Cop, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.
“There are all forms of entertainment“, says Mr. Campbell. “But I choose the simpler forms. I don’t look for B-movies. But they do seem to look for me.”
There is, however, increasing evidence to suggest that the Bruce Campbell experience is finding converts among mainstream audiences. His dry comic beats have, of late, enlivened Hollywood successes such as Sky High and (of course) old pal Sam Raimi’s Spiderman franchise; Burn Notice, Mr. Campbell’s current TV gig, is currently heading into a third season with an Emmy and an Edgar Allan Poe Award; his 2002 autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor leapfrogged any number of better box-office bets to make the New York Times Bestseller list.
“The publishers had no idea who I was,” he says. “But sometimes you have to force things to happen, you know? Against everyone else’s will. I had to pay for the first leg of the national book tour out of my own pocket. Then it took off in a real grassroots kind of way and I had to meet with the publishers who sat scratching their heads and saying ‘we still don’t know who you are’.”
He has since extended his readership with 2005’s Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, a knockabout meta-novel set in a parallel universe where Bruce Campbell is an A-lister who hangs out with Richard Gere.
Similar quasi-fictionalised satirical impulses inform My Name Is Bruce, Mr. Campbell’s second film as a director. Arriving on a tide of knowing meta-movies including Jean Claude Van Damme’s JCVD and Steve Coogan’s Hamlet 2, My Name Is Bruce mercilessly lampoons the ever-burgeoning cult that surrounds our hero.
“I meet plenty of fans at conventions and I think, gee I’m glad we’re meeting when there’s a lot of people around,” admits the star. “I mean 99% of my fans are incredibly docile. Especially the ones that look terrifying. I’ll be at a book signing and there’ll be a whole room of guys with the tattoos and the facial piercings. But the more fearsome looking those guys are, the more sensitive they are. The scariest looking ones are always the guys that are too shy to look you in the eye. I got to be careful taking cheap shots at them.”
In My Name Is Bruce, Bruce Campbell is not the Bruce Campbell who’ll sit patiently through the First Annual Sacramento Trash Film Orgy signing autographs for 300lb Marilyn Manson fans but a snarling drunk who responds with scorn when autograph hounds bug him with the usual enquiries – “When are you doing a fourth Evil Dead picture?”, or “When you worked with Ellen did it turn you gay?”.
“That scene? That’s verbatim,” he says. “Every question those guys ask are the same questions I hear every time I leave the house. Including the guy in the wheelchair.”
The one he shoves into oncoming traffic during the opening scenes?
“Yep. That guy in the wheelchair is a fellow that I met at a convention some years back. He is probably the rudest person I have ever met in my entire life. Oh sorry, I don’t have a more up to date photo. I’m very sorry I spelled that wrong. You’re right. I do look much worse in person. I’m sorry. You have a lovely day sir. What can you do? He’s a fan in a wheelchair. Well, you can cast him in a movie and push him in front of a bus, that’s what. He was glad to do it.”
As My Name Is Bruce progresses Bruce Campbell – playing Bruce Campbell – a Z-picture trailer park drunk who makes late night calls to his ex-wife, is kidnapped from the trashy obscurity of a Cave Alien 2 by an obsessive teenage fan who can’t distinguish between the actor and his valiant Evil Dead alter-ego, Ash. The kid means for his idol to rescue an Oregon mining town from Guan Di, the Chinese deity of war and bean curd, but can Bruce Campbell get it together and quit drinking cheap whiskey from dog bowls?
“Believe it or not, Guan Di is completely organic to Chinese lore”, says Mr. Campbell. “He is the protector of the dead and he’s the protector of bean curd, because in his former life he was a bean curd seller. So you see how that all makes sense, right? When we were working on the script, we knew we were going to be shooting near the small mining town in Oregon where I live. The Chinese built everything in my area. They dug the ditches. They died left and right. It seemed like Guan Di might have cause to be pissed.”
That doesn’t explain the dog bowl scene.
“You got to do what you got to do in the amazing world of motion pictures,” he says. “Playing the biggest jerk imaginable is awesome. I know that somewhere out there, somebody is going to think that I really drink cheap whiskey from dog bowls. That’s ludicrous. I drink very good whiskey out of dog bowls.”
It’s all in good fun but that hasn’t won over many American critics. The Village Voice’s Aaron Hillis dismissed My Name Is Bruce as an “unfunny Campbell love-fest”; in The New York Times, critic Stephen Holden dismissed the film ‘as a silly horror comedy that only a cultist could love’.
“I read the reviews,” says Mr. Campbell. “Any actor or director who tells you they don’t read reviews is a badass liar. It’s all those people talk about. Did you read that New York Times review? It was as though the guy had looked out his window and witnessed me strangling his dog with my bare hands. But he was bound and gagged and could only watch helplessly. Then he sat down to watch the movie. In reality, I’m not sure whose dog I killed but there must have been a lot of them.”
Sure enough, it’s a movie which, as the director and star puts it, will “win zero awards” but taken on its own ridiculous terms, My Name Is Bruce is an unqualified success. It makes you wonder what is left for the great man to accomplish.
“I’d like to be a park ranger,” he says. “If you cross the mountains into Oregon, then just watch out for the man in the pointy hat.”
It’s a date.

My Name Is Bruce is released on DVD on March 3