Bruce Campbell is about to take on the most difficult character of his career – Bruce Campbell. And he’s doing it as the triple threat of producer, director and star.

Taking a nod from reality-based flicks such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, My Name Is Bruce finds the B-movie horror icon best known as Ash in the Evil Dead series as an amplified version of himself, a drunk living in a trailer spiteful of his fans, the business and his life in general.

When the Chinese God of War, Guan-di, attacks a small mining town to avenge the long-ago deaths of Chinese miners, Evil Dead fanatic Jeff (Taylor Sharpe) mistakens the on-screen persona of Bruce for a real hero and convinces the actor to help save the town. Bruce thinks the whole thing is a joke birthday surprise from his agent Ted Raimi, so he decides to go along with the prank and see how it plays out.

Bloody-Disgusting conducted an exclusive interview with Campbell to discuss his turn as a director, the potential for a Bruce series and how much he enjoyed roasting himself.

BD: First off, can you give me a little background on how My Name is Bruce came together?

Campbell: It was pitched to me by Mark Verheiden, who wrote Timecop and The Mask and just recently Battlestar Galactica. I had known Mark from years ago. And then his good friend is Mike Richardson, who owns Dark Horse Comics. They teamed up on this idea and they pitched it to me, basically me playing myself being kidnapped to help to fight a monster in a small Oregon town.

It turns out to be a terrible idea. You know, thinking that Bruce Campbell the hero is Bruce Campbell the hero. But my Bruce Campbell is a horrifying jerk moron and an idiot.

BD: How much involvement did you have with creating this fictional on-screen Bruce?

Campbell: By encouraging Mark Verheiden to not hold back, just to really have fun with it. Messing with the fans and screwing with their perceptions and lying about stuff – there’s so much misinformation going on, it’s like a military campaign. The movie is a lot of smoke and mirrors.

BD: What are the biggest differences between movie Bruce and real Bruce?

Campbell: The main difference is that I don’t really drink whiskey, but in the movie Bruce only drinks Shemp’s Old-Time Whiskey.

BD: Is that a product tie-in?

Campbell: It should be. It’s one of the crappiest whiskeys ever manufactured.

So yeah, Bruce in the movie is a horrible loser and an idiot. He lives in a trailer and feeds his dog whiskey. He’s just finished making the sequel to CaveAlien and that’s spelled one word, CaveAlien. It’s a bad sci-fi movie. That’s where we find our hero, basically at the bottom of his B-movie barrell.

BD: Were there other people you were thinking of as you created this characterization of yourself?

Campbell: No, it would just be the worst version of Bruce Campbell I could think of. You could then have the character go through the journey so that, at the end of the day, even if you remove Bruce Campbell from that aspect, it’s still a character from a low budget B-movie actor who can’t live up to his hype.

I like progressive journeys where, even if you have an idiot at the beginning of the movie, hopefully he’s not as big of an idiot by the end of the movie. It’s his personal journey of going from being a movie hero to a real hero. Question mark, question mark.

BD: How do you think you would hold up if you had to fight a monster in real life?

Campbell: I would hold up poorly. Very poorly. One, because I don’t own a gun so I would have to borrow one from somebody or steal it. I could probably steal and lie a lot if I had to, if I got put in a really bad situation. But the whole shooting gun thing with projectiles, I wouldn’t be really into that.

BD: Over the course of your career, you must have had some strange fan encounters; maybe even one where a fan really thought you were Ash?

Campbell: Well, I took a couple of bits of dialogue verbatim and put them in the movie. I’ll be the only one who will know which bit of dialogue it is. Most people will go “He just wrote that,” but no, I had an actual conversation and I do act out things in the movie that I wish I could do to fans. There are a few things in there that will be overtly offensive, but that’s just the character talking.

BD: So you can blame it on this guy if anyone thinks you’re a jerk after this?

Campbell: Absolutely. “Why are you such a jerk?” I go, “That’s just a character. It’s not me, asshole.”

BD: What’s the fan question you get asked the most?

Campbell: To say “Groovy” or “Boomstick.” They want you to say lines that they could hear if they really wanted to. But they want you to say it, so I convince them that I’m not their little monkey and therefore I don’t have to say it. I’m out of batteries.

BD: Were movies like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Being John Malkovich reference points for this in any way?

Campbell: No, according to Mark Verheiden, it was more based on a comic book in the ‘40s with Alan Ladd, who gets kidnapped to help fight some pirates. He was the movie hero, so they kidnap him to help fight some bad pirates. Alan Ladd didn’t really go the goofy Bob Hope route, but we did.

BD: Tell me about the monster.

Campbell: It’s a low budget movie so it will be what it will be. He’s Guan-di, he’s nine feet tall and has a flowing white beard and glowing red eyes. He is the Chinese God of War and he is the protector of the dead. So this small town is an old mining community and the Chinese did all the work in the mines and there was a horrible collapse and a hundred miners died. And so, Guan-di, in Chinese lore, is the protector of the dead.

So you have your fist scene with the kid with an Evil Dead t-shirt on who messes with this old graveyard, this old tomb which is the old mine shaft. He disturbs and unleashes Guan-di. So it is tied in with actual lore and I haven’t seen many people mess with Guan-di before, so we had fun with it. He’s just this guy who’s going to lop your head off and kill everyone related to who disturbed this grave. And because it’s a small town, they’re all related.

They’re all going to die unless they do something, so that’s why they have to kidnap Bruce Campbell.

BD: That sounds like a more original monster concept.

Campbell: Yeah, it’s not a swamp bog creature or whatever because we’ve kind of been there. This was fun to do, because where I live, Jacksonville, Oregon, really is a mining town and the whole town is a national landmark in that you can’t really change it. If you put dirt down on the streets, it would look like a western town. So it's kind of fun, even within this silly story, weaving in a little fact with fiction.

BD: Which is your preference? Acting, directing or writing?

Campbell: Yes.

BD: You like them all?

Campbell: Absolutely, because it works different sides of you. I like job rotation. And it gives you a more well rounded sense of the business so that, as an actor, you learn what not to throw a hissy about, what’s important and what isn’t.

BD: Is it overwhelming to do all three at once?

Campbell: No, it’s horrible and liberating. But my feeling is, if I’m gonna be in my buddy Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, that’s a whole different thing. You show up and have fun on their huge movie and just have a few laughs on it and get out of there.

In this low budget arena, I want to be able to control everything. Because in the high budget arena, it’s really hard to do that. Sam has a very good control over the whole situation, but they are tough to manage and there’s a lot going on.

This is more easy to control from a scriptwriting process. It’s not as convoluted, we don’t have long meetings about it. I get notes, I give notes. There’s about two or three of us that have to make decisions and that’s it. That’s the beauty of low budget. I like being left alone. To me, that’s what the whole key of all this is, artistic freedom. It’s how happy am I on that film set? If it means making scary little low budget movies, I have absolutely no problem with that.

BD: You’ve really cultivated this image as a B-movie star over the years. What do you see as the positives and negatives in comparison to being an A-lister?

Campbell: A-listers, these guys go to premieres and shit like that. I don’t have to do any of that. I live in Oregon. I don’t have cell service where I live.

BD: So there’s no papparazzi hunting for you?

Campbell: No, the GPS doesn’t even work out where I live so you’d never find it. Plus my neigbors don’t really care. I live where people are not impressed by actors. I live with ranchers and loggers and tough guys. Real tough guys. So that’s my audience out in Oregon. It causes me to not overinflate what I do either.

I don’t live in L.A. and I haven’t for the past ten years, so I don’t feel a false pressure to attend Joe Blow’s premiere or this party or, you know, you really should be at this thing. I’m like, “Nah, I don’t have to.” You don’t have the same pressure to generate the machinary, to generate the cash, the money to support your own system.

BD: So is the Bruce Campbell in My Name is Bruce the Bruce Campbell that stayed in L.A.?

Campbell: That’s probably the best analogy yet. That’s more true than you would know.

BD: Do you see this as part of a series or a trilogy?

Campbell: Oh, we could keep going. We already have the European version planned.

BD: What’s that one about?

Campbell: It’s Bruce as the ugly American. He’s going to a convention in Europe and then certain circumstances come up where they may have to fight another creature with a bunch of other people who are at the same convention. So you might get more of a bevy of your Robert Englund’s and your Jasons and Freddys and things like that.

We have the money already, but we think it would be a little disingenious to start working on the sequel before the first one came out. That’s why I’m going to tour. I’m going to 22 cities to try to make this work. It’s been a long road, but independent movies take a while and I’m glad we can finally get it in front of people.