Bruce Campbell stars as Sam Axe in USA Networks hit series, Burn Notice which premiered an all new season on Thursday, June 4^th, in its new time slot at 9:00/8:00 Central.    Starting as a producer in Detroit in 1979 for Evil Dead, Campbell has a long history of starring in and producing numerous genre films such as the Maniac Cop series, MoonTrap, and Mindwar, as well as the 2nd and 3rd films in the Evil Dead trilogy.  He later had a recurring role in Lois and Clark, and gained experience as a director helming numerous Xena and Hercules episodes.  He recently expanded his resume to include the role of author with back to back New York Times bestsellers, and crossed over into voice over work for the animated Tarzen, and The Ant Bully.

His character, Sam, is a former Navy Seal and Intel operative, and worked many times with Michael in the past.  Now, although he has moved on to women and booze as his major pursuits, he is an invaluable asset to Michael in the spy game.  Bruce recently took time to talk about his character, and the many joys of working on the hit series.

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> In watching the screeners, it felt like the third episode should have been the first episode, since it picked up right where the second season left off.  Do you know if there was a reason that they were ordered that way?

Bruce Campbell> Well, that is tough for me to answer, not being in on the big picture like.  Actors, we're always the last people to know anything. But they were meant to be screened where, Tim Matheson’s episode, I think it's “Friends & Family” is the first one, and we shot them out of order because we wanted to kind of get up to speed for the new season before we let them have it with the big opener. So we shot the first episode third, so I don’t know, maybe they gave it to you in some strange order.

Question> How is Burn Notice different from past TV shows you’ve done?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> I do have to say I'm a bit offended that you think that only old people like the movies like Evil Dead here.  Come on, come on.

Bruce Campbell> No, I'm poking fun because I'm older than all of you.

Question> All right, all right.  In fact, you mentioned on, I think it was the commentaries for Evil Dead II that Sam Raimi sort of, beat you up and smacked you around. And other than that, how do you think that Sam compares to your other roles, and what is your favorite part of playing him?

Bruce Campbell> Oh, I see.  Boy, 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.

Question> Was that part of your research for becoming Sam?

Bruce Campbell> With what, bleep with a lot of rich Miami women?

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> 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?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> 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?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> 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?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> You just mentioned that we’ll see a bit of Sam’s past and I read somewhere that season three will be dealing a lot with Michael, Fiona, and Sam’s past.  Is everything from Sam’s past going to be connected to Michael, or will it be unrelated events?

Bruce Campbell> Oh, no, Sam’s got his own past, but I'm sure if they bring up any of our pasts, it will relate to the future; like we're shooting an episode right now that is very Fiona-oriented.  Her past is coming back to haunt us now, in a very, very bad way.  So I think what they’ll do in that case is that they allude to someone’s past, it’ll be because somebody, you know, Sam’s done something in the past.  We even had an episode with this character Virgil who is dating Michael’s mother.  The first episode that he was in was he was an old pal of mine who got into some trouble, and that happens a lot.  Sam has things from his past that come up to haunt us currently, so I think you’ll see more of that.

Question> The stories of Sam and his girlfriends are fascinating.  How does he find these women, or are his criteria really just car and money-based, or is there more to it?

Bruce Campbell> No, it's what he does to the ladies.  It's his special skill with the ladies.  So it doesn’t matter that he has no job or car or place to live.  Sam can still get the ladies because, obviously, he's doing something with or to the ladies that is very successful, which we can’t discuss here.

Question> 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?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question> You mentioned a little bit about Tim Aston coming back, so can you tell us anything about any other guest stars you might be seeing this season?

Bruce Campbell> Oh, boy, guest stars.  They come and go.  We got Nick Turturro, who was on NYPD Blue, he's playing a weasely criminal character.  I'm not so good with rattling all the things off.  We're starting to get a good stable of directors, like Tim Matheson is becoming a stable director element.  So it would be nice to see him come back.  I hope he's in another episode as this guy Larry.  He plays this crazy guy, Larry, who, I hope he comes back, because Tim is a really good actor, too.  We had Lucy Lawless, I think on our second episode we got Lucy in.  That was real fun to do.  I got a bunch of friends we're always trying to get in there.  They're coming and going.  So it's sort of a stay tuned thing, to see who is coming.  But the nice thing is when you have a hit show, you can get better actors.  No one wants to be on a show with lousy ratings.

Question> Have you finished shooting the season already?

Bruce Campbell> No, we're about halfway through, we're working on episode eight right now.  So we're just about halfway through.  We finish the end of August.

Question> There are rumors of new movies such as another Evil Dead, maybe another Phantasm, maybe even another Bubba Ho-tep, which has sexy vampires, so you could be good with the ladies.  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.

Bruce Campbell> 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.

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.

Question>                    What's the future of his love life looking like?

Bruce Campbell> He's got this woman he's dating, Ms. Reynolds, but it's only because she loaned him a cool car.  So I don’t think it's real serious.  And I don’t think there's that much floating around.  I think, if it's integral to the story and we can get some value out of it, I think they’ll do that.  But I don’t think they're doing it because I feel like I need to have a romance.  I kind of like Sam just picking up ladies.

Question> So we’ve seen you in the Old Spice commercials.  Can we expect a Sam Axe body spray?

Bruce Campbell> It's weird, they're putting commercials inside the TV shows now.  I’ve already done ads, unpaid I might add, for DirecTV.  I even have a line of dialogue.  “Mike, we can’t go back into that bar now.  It's my favorite, it's got DirecTV in HD.”  Cadillac we’ve promoted.  Panerai watches we promoted, and now Miller Genuine Draft, so, unfortunately the way advertising is going, I may not be doing a Sam Axe body spray because they’ll just put it in the show.  So things are changing rapidly.  It's a very strange world out there as far as advertising goes.

Question> I find you to be somewhat of a comedic genius, honestly, so I was sort of wondering, do you do a lot of things, sort of impromptu on the set, or with your comrades, do you guys just sort of go off the cuff every time?

Bruce Campbell> We never look for that.  We do respect the writers, but there are some situations that the script won’t flesh out.  There are sequences where Sam has to stall, for example, or he has to go into a Pakistani Embassy and create a scene.  Well, it's hard for a writer to write every single bit of that, but when they go to shoot it, you come to find out that you need a lot more material than you had in order to cut back and forth, and to give Michael Westen time to do something, you need something to cut back to.  So that's more where we’ll improvise.  I’ve done this Chuck Finley character for a number of episodes and whenever Chuck’s around, there's more opportunities from that.  Or, honestly, at the end of the scene comes and we don’t have a way to put a good button on it or a little spin or a little something, then we’ll come up with something.  But normally, we’ll let the writers do their thing and we’ll see if we can help them out, if it's appropriate.

Question> 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?

Bruce Campbell> 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.

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

Bruce Campbell> 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.