With his newest Peacock horror show Hysteria!, Bruce Campbell feels he took the opportunity to make something truly worthwhile. The actor best known for playing Ash across the Evil Dead franchise wants to create great works outside that legacy. STARBURST got a chance to speak with him at New York Comic Con 2024 about his new show out now on Peacock.
When asked what drew him to Hysteria, Campbell was kind but short. “The writing.” “What about the writing?” we ask. “It doesn’t suck,” Campbell replies curtly, to appreciative laughter. “Look, it’s that simple. I’ve done tons of movies that suck. I had a writer declare one time that his dialogue was actor-proof, like it was so good that no actor could screw it up. I was like no, no, you got it wrong. It’s such shitty dialogue no actor can say the words. Your shitty words.” Does he care about his legacy then? “No that’s for pundits. I don’t curate my own legacy, I just try to make sure there’s not shitty pictures out there.”
Campbell holds himself somewhere between a rambling president’s authority and a classic rock star’s swagger, yet holds sincere care for his project. His focus on finding good scripts isn’t his only reason for taking on the show. “…writing stands out to me. If it’s a horror project I ask even more questions. Peacock is a good partner. I’ve worked with Universal over the years. Universal is the horror studio. They always were. So I remember them even if they don’t remember me…so that matters. Because when someone says ‘Hey, come be in my movie called Black Friday‘… Totally independent, privately financed… you don’t know if anyone is going to see that. And my wife is really good at pointing that out. She goes ‘really, is that such a hard decision between that dumb movie and Peacock?'”
The move from Peacock into this small town ‘80s horror comes a year before Netflix’s Stranger Things premieres its fifth and final season. It follows a small town discovering odd happenings around a band taking advantage of the satanic panic. “My character,” Campbell tells with pride, “is trying to figure out whether it’s real or not. And he’s a very rational individual… I’m playing him as the chief of police that you would want.” Campbell has so much respect for the character as he proudly states, “He’s not a doofus and he does not condescend to the teenagers either. He goes ‘dude just tell me what’s going on. What the hell, you carved a pentagram into your hand? Wow, that’s uh… that’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”
Campbell loses himself in enthusiasm as he talks about preparing for the role with real-life police officers. Talking about the show gives him so much energy, only stopped by comparison. Another reporter points out that Chief Dandridge is more wholesome than Campbell as Ash, to which the actor bristles. “Yeah, but see, it’s not Ash, right? You know I’m an actor. They give me certain words; I say the words. I don’t have to put Ash into my roles.”
The same reporter later asks him about the possibility of an Evil Dead animated show, which Campbell dismisses as “not even rumours… There’s nothing really to report, but we want to.”
Noticing his face falling into a robotic blank when talking Evil Dead, STARBURST asks Campbell if he feels it’s been a bit of a drag to come back to that well. “Well yeah, I don’t bring it up, you guys bring it up. Yeah, it gets old. I would pay, sometimes, a thousand dollars for a question I’ve never heard before. Which hasn’t happened yet.”
Campbell loves the idea of centring the chief as the heart of Hysteria! “Print that big!” he says grinning, ready to get off of old, Ash-covered projects as soon as possible.
Hysteria! is available to stream on Peacock.
