Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
“Okay, Daddio.”

This is how Bruce Campbell says goodbye. Not just in the movies. What does this mean? It’s means that he speaks like Sammy Davis Jr. in front of people. It means Campbell ends a phone conversation the way a martini would, were it equipped with a mouth hole. It means that his one-liners – the butter to his bread – are not scripted, or at least they don’t have to be. He’s able to generate the material that has grown him a cult over his lengthy career – since he started making those initially real, then satirical faux horror pictures with Sam Raimi – and popularized him as the world’s greatest B-movie actor. It’s a title that he’s ridden to great fame that still masquerades as anonymity.

He lives a secluded existence on a butt-load of Southern Oregon country acreage, away from the rat race, with his wife and four cats. He cares not for the trappings of Hollywood fame and that’s good because as a genre actor those trappings aren’t free-flowing for someone who kicks it with independent film companies and never really knows when his movies are going to be released. Filming them is just half the battle and that’s the way Campbell likes it. He’s working. He’s a blue collar actor, happy to swing from one project to the next, packing away the appearances and padding the sizable resume with more sharp comebacks and gruff demeanor that may either preclude or postscript some kind of zombie or werewolf killing. There are times when Ash – comfortable with his own station in life (touring bookstores signing copies of the New York Times bestseller “Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way” and seeing his short-lived television series “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.” finally get released on DVD) – worries about Lindsey Lohan and how the freckly tart doesn’t have it as lucky as he does in Oregon with his wife and cats.

“I feel sorry for her and all those people that get stalked by the paparazzi. You have to shred everything that goes out of your house. It’s a bunch of horseshit,” Campbell said. “You can’t help a lot of it. You can’t help it if they recognize you. They offer to have a beer together and sometimes I try to do that.

“I live a thankfully very normal existence. Not many people can assimilate with the famous in certain places, but here (in Oregon), if I’m at the grocery store, no one thinks, ‘Why would this guy be at this grocery store?’ I never really wanted to have much of that. I don’t need any of the fame whatsoever.”

The man with the chin that could maim (not so sure about its proposed lethality) plays those tough S.O.B.-types who still know their brazen ways around a woman’s mouth. He’s got an unpolished Elvis-like swagger and what seems to be a man on an island toughness to him that brushes off, at least partially, in all of the roles he plays. And yet, he’s survived in the cutthroat business of making motion pictures with his likeability and a bond with his fans that he’s taken personally. At one point, earlier in his career, he made a point of answering every e-mail sent to him, personally. Even now, he says he maintains a stamina for those correspondences, but he’s more choosy.

“If it’s not lame or stupid, I’ll still write back,” he said. “I try to surf around. The thing with e-mail is you don’t really know if these people are who they say they are. Someone could be claiming to be this beautiful woman and they’re actually a 400-pound slob. I don’t really know.”

Campbell has been on a book tour this fall, but prior to that, he was filming an indie flick – “My Name Is Bruce” – about a small town that’s been overcome with monsters and it mistakenly hires a B-movie actor to get rid of them, a lesson they probably learned worked when the residents of Santa Pulco unburdened themselves of El Guapo in “Three Amigos.” The entire movie, with an unknown release date as all indies go, according to Campbell, was filmed on his acreage in Oregon. An entire city was constructed on his land.

“I’m just going to leave it. It’s too extensive to tear down,” he said. “There’s a tavern, a gun store, a town hall, a livery stable…It took us two months to build. It was the first time I’ve ever slept in my own bed, rolled out of it and shot a movie.”

So he’s got an Old West-inspired town in his backyard, a successful book-writing career and a million other irons in the fire, but Campbell may never really be famous. He hopes not at least. He’s a worker and he keeps being offered jobs. He’s found his ideal situation, knowing his exact fit into a numbing Hollywood world where the blockbuster is the golden fleece, but you have to skin yourself to get it. Not Campbell, who does it all on his terms.

“Nothing I’ve done has been a smash hit,” he said. “With ‘Bubba Ho Tep,’ we did three million at the box office. Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, that was a bomb.’ But it wasn’t. We did really well with that movie and it’s doing great DVD sales. I tend to define success differently than the big boys. If I had $100 million dollars to make movies with, I know where I’d put my money. I would make 100 $1 million dollar movies instead of one shitty, bloated one. Putting all you eggs in one basket is stupid.”

Bruce Campbell