Senior editor Roxanne Bogucka spoke to Bruce Campbell by phone last fall, and did not tell him to hang up and drive, even though he was hurtling down Hwy. 290 East to Houston during the conversation.

Roxanne Bogucka: You’ve been involved in a lot of science fiction and fantasy-related projects, and I wondered if that was your genre of choice.

Bruce Campbell: No, it’s just that when you, if you pick a genre period, like a western or a even sci-fi or something, you still have to have a protagonist. And usually those protagonists have to go through some great adventure. And I think by doing movies like Army Of Darkness, I sort of set myself up for that, you know what I mean?

RB: Um hmm.

BC: That by being in movies like that, that’s the general assumption. They go, “Oh let’s get the Army Of Darkness guy. Put him in there.” So it’s nothing I seek out, but it’s nothing I shy away from.

RB: The project that you have that we’re all eagerly awaiting right now is Bubba Ho-tep. Had you read Joe Lansdale’s story before you got involved with the project?

BC: No I hadn’t. The only thing I read first was Don Coscarelli’s script. And I thought, “Man, this is the weirdest script I’ve ever read.”

RB: It’s a pretty strange story. How did you get involved in Bubba Ho-tep?

BC: Well Don called me up, because Sam Raimi actually recommended to Don that he call me, because Don was talking to Sam about this just casually, they had met each other a couple of times. So Don called me. He knew of me from the Evil Dead films. Obviously I knew of him. And he said, “Hey I want you to look at this thing, let me know what you think.” And I read it. It was outrageous, you know, an old crabby Elvis who’s way over his prime. I thought it was a fun way to go. But he hadn’t had it set up yet, so I said, “Just call me when you’re ready.” And about a year later he did.

RB: So I understand that Joe saw the movie and he said it was very faithful to his story. So…

BC: Joe was actually, it’s the rare case of the writer being pleased so we, Don and I feel like we didn’t butcher his work.

RB: So how faithful was it? You know, there’s a lot of, well there’s a lot of penis action in Bubba Ho-tep, so was this…

BC: Oh yeah but it’s not explicit, you know what I mean? That was one of my first phone calls to Don. I said, “You not really gonna… you’re not going to get graphic with this are you?” And he goes, “No.”

RB: So this is not your full-frontal film debut then.

BC: No. It’s very restrained.

RB: Were you an Elvis fan?

BC: No not really. Because by the time I became a teenager, you know, I came of age pretty much when he was about to die. So to me Elvis was always bloated, Hawaii-comeback sort of guy. But the more you get to know him, the more outrageous he was. Because he had another 20 years before that where the guy was working his ass off. So I watched a lot of concert footage and things like that—he’s amazing. He’s astounding. He was The King.

RB: Hail to The King.

BC: But the nice thing is, I didn’t have to imitate him, quote unquote, more than characterize him.

RB: Because he was much older than the Elvis that anyone’s ever known.

BC: Yeah, no one’s ever played Elvis at 68, so I think I got a lock on the Elvis at 68.

RB: Huh. That’s interesting that you weren’t an Elvis fan. I think we’re about the same age, I was born in ’58—

BC: I was too.

RB: —and I made my mother take me to all these Elvis films when I was like 4 and 5.

BC: I never tapped in. My mom was not that plugged in. Musically our family was just not aware. So I heard the music only because of hanging around with other people.

RB: So what was it like working with Ossie Davis?

BC: Fantastic. I kept saying, “Ossie, why are you in this movie?” I think it was the same thing for him. None of us were making it to get rich. It was a good role for Ossie, and—

RB: Well you don’t get to play JFK very often, and probably for Ossie Davie…

BC: No. No one’s going to ask you to play JFK and the funny thing is, he’s met him. Ossie’s been around so long, he’s just a classy guy. He met him and a couple of other presidents. I thought that was pretty good. He’s a really classy guy and a real gentleman. A real old-school gentleman.

RB: That’s so neat to hear. So when will Bubba Ho-tep be in a theater near me? Or near anyone?

BC: Bubba Ho-tep would be, well there’s the great independent void right now. That’s the down side of a truly independent movie. They’re floating until someone’s wise enough to snap it up. We’re doing the festival circuit right now. Which is a way to get distributors aware of the movie.

RB: I understand it was really well received at the Toronto Film Festival.

BC: It played really well, yeah. I went to a midnight screening there on a Saturday and it was packed. Yeah, it played just like a movie should.

RB: And now I understand you recently were involved in another Kennedy-related film, playing a filmmaker who finds out something about the JFK assassination in Dallas. That’s kind of a weird coincidence.

BC: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a what-if story. I think it’s called Second Chance. It’s the story of a time traveller who wants to save JFK from getting killed. And so it’s that whole scenario and it’s very interesting. And I just have this small little part of this Oliver Stone kind of filmmaker.

RB: When might we be able to see Second Chance?

BC: Again, same thing. It’s floating in the great void. But that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes. I go for the role, I don’t go for the, you know, coming to 1800 screens near you. So who knows? I mean, they’ll all hit DVD eventually, which is not even a bad thing these days. You know DVD is the best presentation your movie will ever have. You can put the whole package on, you know.

RB: Now you’re touring behind your biography, If Chins Could Kill—

BC: Yeah, the paperback tour now.

RB: Was that always the title that you had in mind? Or were there some other proposed titles for your book?

BC: There were only variations of the chin thing. But yeah, that was mainly what was always in play.

RB: When did you find time to write this book? You sound like a pretty busy guy?

BC: Yeah that’s a good question, uh… it took four years. From about ’97 to 2001. I was a working actor, so I would just write it weekends, nights, on planes, trains, and automobiles.

RB: Is there so new material in the paperback?

BC: You bet. Sure. You don’t want people to be ripped off if they have to buy the paperback. I wrote 40 new pages, mainly about what it’s like to go on the book tour. And it was a pretty fertile ground.

RB: How long is the book tour?

BC: Well the last book tour for the hardcover was 55 cities in five months.

RB: Well I really enjoyed reading If Chins Could Kill. One of the things that was absolutely wonderful was reading about the Junior Filmmakers Guild that you and the young men in your neighborhood, who now all work in film…

BC: Yeah that’s right.

RB: When was the last time or the last project when you were all together? Was it way back then, or…

BC: Yeah, pretty much. We’ve grouped up in groups of two and three sometimes, you know. Like I just worked on Intolerable Cruelty, the next Coen Brothers film. So that’s a Coen Brothers connection, my buddy John Cameron who was from high school, is the line producer for all their movies now, and the guy who picked me up in the car was David Goodman, who was known as the filmmaker’s burden. So all of a sudden we looked at each other and started laughing because we went, “Well, there’s half of us here, you know? We’re just missing 3, 4 of the other guys.”

RB: That’s great that you get to work together.

BC: It does happen every so often.

RB: In the future, when they’re having Bruce Campbell retrospectives and they’ve made the movie of If Chins Could Kill, who should play you?

BC: I’m the wrong guy to ask, because they’ll never make it. You know the funny thing is, they don’t care because they would cast an A-movie star to star in the life of a B-actor. Who knows? I wouldn’t have much say.

RB: I really miss, and I’m not alone in this, “Brisco County.” I wondered if you had seen this new show called “Firefly,” which combines elements of science fiction and westerns.

BC: I have not seen it yet. I’ve only seen the various clips on TV. Unfortunately I’m not much of a TV watcher these days. I just don’t have the time.

RB: When you’re out on the street and people recognize you, what do they say more? Do they say, “Hey Brisco!” or “Hey Ash!” or do they say, “Hello Mr. Campbell!” or…

BC: There are some pretty straightforward percentages involved. About 50% of the people will say “Hey Ash!” And then about 25% will say, you know, from “Herc” and “Xena.” And another group, 20% or so, will say Brisco. And then the other 5% will be miscellaneous things. But the majority is probably the Evil Dead movies.

RB: How do you feel about the sort of cult celebrity status that you have.

BC: It’s okay because there’s nothing you could really do about it. I don’t really spend any time controlling it. I don’t really have any control over it. So it’s just, I don’t mind those movies. They were all good experiences generally speaking, you know, creatively and otherwise. And I don’t mind if people relate me to that because, usually what happens if you check those movies out, you wind out checking other movies that I’ve done too. So it’s not a bad little introduction to who I am. For those people who go, “Who’s Bruce Campbell?”

RB: You’ve got a pretty rabid fan base of people though, from the very things that you mentioned before—either the Evil Dead movies or from “Brisco County” or from “Xena” or “Hercules.” What’s the most high-faluting, I guess if you could imagine theater in quotation marks, role that you’ve ever had? Something that your core fan base probably hasn’t stumbled across?

BC: Oh something that I’ve done?

RB: Yeah.

BC: Oh not everyone has seen the two-parter “Homicide” that I did. That’s a real mainstream TV show. And not that many people saw the “Ellen” episodes that I did.

RB: I actually did see you on “Ellen” once.

BC: And the things like Love Bug and Gold Rush, because I had a contract with Disney for a while…

RB: Now you did a documentary a couple of years ago, Fanalysis, that was about fans. And the documentary is done, but I wonder. You still have conference and convention appearances. Are you still sort of filming and studying fans and fandom?

BC: Oh sure because, going on this book tour, it’s almost the same thing. It’s almost like going to a convention every time you go to a book signing. You meet all the same characters. But it’s always fun to ask them what they do and you get a good cross-section, a good flavor of who they are. They’re a very tattooed bunch. Piercings are on the rise also.

RB: I see that bruce-hyphen-campbell-dot-com just reopened a bunch of pages in the last week or so. It’s looking really good. I was wondering, how much fan mail and “I want to be an actor” pleadings do you deal with?

BC: I get probably the average smattering. I think people, the whole point of my web site’s various ranting and ramblings is to let them know that, don’t bother tormenting me about certain things because you’re just as good trying to get your own thing together, you know. And the book is sort of a how-to for anyone who, I think it helps a lot of people decide to either be an actor or definitely not be an actor.

RB: I wondered if writing the book and having it out there had maybe led to more contact from fans, because the book and just talking to you now, you seem so approachable.

BC: That’s the idea. I don’t like this whole secrecy thing of celebrity. It’s like, who cares? You know that’s how people get stalked, is that you’re playing this cat-and-mouse game. Look I understand why a guy like Tom Cruise would not, could not do certain things. But I like just getting out and doing my thing. It’s a good way to go.

RB: Are there things that you can not do now? You can still go down to the hardware store on a Saturday morning…

BC: Oh yeah, I can pretty much go anywhere, because I live in Oregon and the whole thing about living in Oregon is people just don’t care. They’re not impressed. And that’s great too, because the result is, they’re not all coming up to me and saying, “Hey can you sign my Ash doll?”

RB: You have a family, you have kids.

BC: They’re pretty grown. My daughter’s 18. My son is 15.

RB: So they’re old enough to have seen some of the Evil Dead material.

BC: Oh sure, they’ve seen them all.

RB: And so, I always wonder how that works out, when there are people who are, “Oh we love Evil Dead movies” or “We love Brisco County”…

BC: I think they’re only impressed when their friends mentions something.

RB: Ahh.

BC: I think they’ve been around it their whole life. I’ve been acting for 20 years now, longer than the kids have been alive. And that’s all they’ve known, is the gypsy lifestyle and that sort of scared them away too. But they got pretty comfortable with the whole thing. Like, that’s what I do. I’m like a factory worker, I just happen to be an actor, you know. And then it’s only when some other kid would go, “Oh your dad rules!” Then they go, “Oh really?”

RB: News to them.

BC: Exactly.

RB: What are you going to be working on next? Are you going to be doing more directing?

BC: Another book.

RB: Great.

BC: I have to turn in my manuscript in the middle of March.

RB: And it will be…

BC: This is a light-hearted look at relationships. It’s called Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way.

RB: Okay.

BC: And it’ll be the non-expert view of men and women. There will be no PhDs involved in writing this book. It’ll be a book of the people for the people.

RB: By one of the people.

BC: That’s right. We’ll be sharing foibles, know what I mean?

RB: Is there anything else that you would like the readers of hybridmagazine and the world at large to know about Bruce Campbell.

BC: Yeah, if you want to know where I’m going to be just go to bruce-campbell.com because if you don’t put the hyphen in you get a Dodge dealership in Michigan.

RB: I saw that, yeah.

BC: But the way, a lot of people go, “What’re you up to?” That’s why the web site’s there. It’ll tell you where you can buy stuff, where you can find stuff, where you can find me. It’ll straighten out, it’s rumor-control. We’re cleaning it up. We’re trying to improve it all the time. And you can’t always update it every single day, but we’re trying to keep current. So that people can use that as a clearinghouse of information of what’s coming up. We’ll give you links to bookstores and conventions so that you can find out information for yourself and go do some further exploration, so that’s what it’s for.

RB: Have you been to Houston before? Have you been to Murder By The Book?

BC: I don’t think I’ve been there. I did a convention or two that took me in and out of Houston but I don’t think I’ve done a signing in Houston before.

RB: Well this is, I don’t know if you like to read mysteries but this a fabulous independent bookstore. If you like that sort of thing and if you’re looking for anything, you can find it there. Those are really great people and they have a wonderful store.

BC: Neat.

RB: How does that work out when you’re doing a book tour? You keep winding up in bookstores. Do you have to leave your wallet at home so you’re not buying books all the time? Is it overwhelming temptation?

BC: No I can’t carry anything with me. I can’t accumulate a single item when I’m on the road. I don’t buy anything. Because I… my clothes, my suitcases… I’ve got to do 5 or 6 cities… my suitcases are jammed. So I can’t accumulate. When people give me stuff at the table I have to have the bookstore ship it to my house. So I’m not a big purchaser. If I find something that’s cool, as a result of being in a bookstore, I just order on Amazon. I’m a real Amazon guy.

RB: I want to thank you very much.

BC: No problem.