|
Back to Burn Notice for Season 3 with Bruce Campbell
by Troy Rogers
 Bruce
Campbell has embodied many characters over the
years and somehow, no matter who he plays, the
former Evil Dead, Briscoe County Jr., Xena actor
is believably unique in every role. After two
seasons as the beer swilling, past-his-prime covert
agent, Sam Axe, on USA Network's Burn Notice,
Bruce Campbell returns to the Miami set series
for a third season of secret activity with Jeffrey
Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, and Sharon Gless on
June 4 at 9pm.
With Burn Notice now firmly established as one of USA's most popular shows, Season 3 sees the pasts of its characters coming back to haunt the present in interconnecting ways after an explosive second season finale. With Michael Westen free of the organization that originally burn him, Burn Notice takes on a new direction in a brand new season over covert network ops.
Leading up to the third season premiere, we spent a couple of brief minutes with Bruce Campbell on a conference call where the versatile acting vet gave us the scoop on Sam's love-life, the connections between the past and present, whether we'll ever see him direct a few episodes of Burn Notice, and if he'll be making a cameo in Spider-Man 4.
THE DEADBOLT: Is everything from Sam’s past going to be connected to Michael, or will it be unrelated?
 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.
THE DEADBOLT: I thought the wealthy beer distributor was like a match made in heaven for Sam.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
THE DEADBOLT: But that didn’t quite work out. What's the future of his love-life looking like?
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.
Other Conference Call Highlights:
Bruce Campbell on what gadget he likes from the show
or in real life:
 "I
haven’t really used any of the gadgets, because
obviously they don’t really work. As a kid I
just blew stuff up. My brother had magnesium
and we had sulfur and we had some other ingredients,
gun powder, and we would just blow things up,
so that was as close as I ever got. The best
gadget my brothers and I ever made was a UFO,
where we made it out of balsa wood strut. It
was a rectangular shape with a dry cleaning
bag over the top of it, with a couple of struts
at the bottom that we glued handles to; and
you light the candles on fire, the heat goes
up into the bag, and because the balsa wood
is so light, it just lifts off into the air;
and so we sent numerous UFOs from our neighborhood,
and one of them got written up in the local
paper as a UFO sighting."
Campbell on whether he'll be directing again and if he’d
be up for directing an episode of Burn Notice:
"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."
Bruce Campbell on whether the comedic elements of the
show are improvised:
 "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."
Campbell on Sam’s world view and how it impacts the way
he plays the role:
"Sam actually has a good sense of right and wrong; sometimes he's the little canary in the coal mine on the show, 'Mike, this doesn’t sound good, or I think this is dangerous,' or whatever. I think Sam is realistic, he's probably, I wouldn’t say jaded - I don’t want to say jaded - but I just think he's realistic in that if he doesn’t trust a guy, his B.S. meter would tell him that this guy is a moron. I think Sam makes probably quicker decisions, maybe he's a little more hasty in making it, and yes, I think if he hadn’t run into Fiona and Mike, he wouldn’t be looking for people to help. He would be looking for a beer to drink."
Bruce Campbell on continuing to appear in the Spider-Man
movies:
 "I’ll
probably be in Spider-Man 4, but I never hear
from Sam [Raimi] usually until the last minute,
when they’ve got everything worked out. So we’ll
just see what he's got up his sleeve."
Bruce Campbell on what makes a better enemy; zombies
from the Necronomicon, or the spies of Burn
Notice:
"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."
|
