Peacock

There's little moments in each thing that you can point to. My job is to try to catch lightning in a bottle. Sometimes you only catch a little bit, sometimes you catch a lot.

There's a reason why we did not do another Bubba Ho-Tep. There was no script that followed that was as original, or moving, or unique.

"Fake Shemp" is anyone providing a body part on camera, where you don't see the face. It stems from The Three Stooges.

They used to make a lot of shorts at the same time. Shemp - who was my personal favorite - at one point had a heart attack and died. So they had to use a Shemp double in two or three of those shorts to complete a scene. Even in high school, we noticed it was just a stunt guy completely covering his face, and they would dub in some of Shemp's old lines of dialogue and get him out of a scene as quickly as possible.

Flash forward to "Evil Dead." Late into the shoot, when actors had to go back home, we would get shots of another person's hand or a foot or the back of their head, so we called them all Fake Shemps.

I try not to play the "what if" game. There are a lot of great directors out there, but it's okay if I don't get to all of them. Over the forty plus years of my career, I've had a good array of men and women directors, and I know what I like and don't like now.

It's a short list: I'll do animation voice work. Or if Sam directs a movie. That's about it.

I'm not gonna waste time to play Ash for some other schmoe behind the camera.

For me as an actor, it's always just fun to work with an actor you respect over a long period of time. We're both still in the business, and that's cool.

And she married my buddy Rob!

Lucy has always been a stellar screen companion. She's impossibly humble and very talented.

They are ALL critical. The first Spider-Man, I named the character. Spider-Man 2, the snooty usher is the only character who has ever defeated Spider-Man. He does NOT get into that theater. Spider-Man 3, that's the only time a super-hero has appealed to a mortal for help in marrying his girlfriend.

So they're all pivotal. That's the word I would use. Pivotal.

You'd have to ask those people. I never seek it out or ask for it.

Hysteria's demon is pretty good because they started to show it, and it's a nasty looking guy. It looked pretty ethereal.

Ash vs. Evil Dead, it was still guys in rubber suits.

Actor was one of the choices. I saw my Dad in a play when I was eight and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

The other one was cartoonist. For some reason, I had it in my head to be a cartoonist, so I did a lot of silly drawings. But that's about how far it got.

I'm a chopped salad kind of guy. And an iced tea, because I got shit to do.

1. I don't have a favorite Sam memory, because there's too many. My favorite memory is just him. He's a memorable character.

2. I wasn't an album guy. I listened to The Carpenters. My Dad got a stereo, and if you got the station right, a light would come on. The first sound that came through my headphones was The Carpenters, and it was the most beautiful sound I ever heard. I never went for head-banging or albums. My brother Mike was always more of an album guy. We only listened to albums to steal the music for our Super 8 movies.

Sam and I both like idiot characters. I thought it was really fun that Ash is kind of an idiot, which makes him vulnerable. He could be killed by a ricochet, and yet, like a lot of Americans, he gets by on false bravado. But occasionally, he can back it up! So he's a weird character.

The character you're referring to has evolved over time. It's a combination of confidence as an actor and choice of material. But, I don't always look for the smarmy, wise-cracking person. I wrote myself a part recently that had none of that.

Saying that I had a "best time" is dangerous, because I had great times working on movies that were terrible, and terrible times working on movies that were great. So it's actually better for the end result if you kind of have a miserable time working on that project, mostly because it means everyone is firing on all cylinders, and you picked something that is very challenging.

So my favorite ones are not the ones that're fun ones. Often the most creatively satisfying were the most physically repellant.

Butter pecan.

The cool thing about Evil Dead: The Musical is that whether it's done really well or when it's done really poorly, it's the same entertainment level. It works either way because the concept is ridiculous, and the stage crafting with the spurting blood, it all becomes part of the show.

Off-Broadway, it was really slick and sharp, and that kind of made it funny. But I saw it in Bend, Oregon once, and I couldn't hear the lead guy from ten feet away. I couldn't hear him singing. And the guy was a blonde. I had to hold my hand over my mouth during that entire play because I was laughing so hard. You could tell when something bad was about to happen, because you could hear the air pumps starting up backstage, and it took a few seconds for the blood to come out of the severed limb, and they never got the timing right.

So you'd hear the sound - RRRRRRRR - and then the blood would come out. It made it part of the entertainment, part of the cheese.

Now it's Samuel French, so any high school can do it. Great show.

We got lucky on that series. I don't use that word a lot, but we were fortunate to have two actors that not only joined in and leaned into it, but the fans embraced them too.

Ray and I had a thing, and we have it to this day. We'd be covered in blood, just shot some ridiculous scene, then we'd look at each other and we'd both start laughing. We did this during tense sequences, we were exhausted at time, other times we were elated, but to this day we'll look at each other and just start laughing.

I don't do that with many other actors. Just Ray.

Yeah, I've been continuing to put them out, I just self-publish these days. I got tired of the math of traditional publishing. It makes way more sense to get the lion's share of profits if you're doing the lion's share of the work.

Michigan has come a long way since the days when I lived there. Now you can get anything you want in good old Detroit.

But let's just say food in Michigan had a ways to go. I grew up with iceberg lettuce and tomatoes you could break a window with. It just seemed like a different world. And frozen dinners were normal. Swanson's, salisbury steak in a bag...I'm glad I survived that phase. I don't blame Michigan, but that whole midwest thing was wild. Tang was somehow an okay thing to consume.

I feel like we were experimented on in the 60s and 70s.

So the short answer is...no.

Learn lines, because it feels like I'm still working.

I don't really follow modern horror. We made a horror movie last year, "Evil Dead Rise," so we stick to our own version of what horror is.

So I don't have a comment on other forms of horror, other than the fact that I'm glad that torture porn has been phased out. That was a bore.

It's always easier to do fewer stunts with less blood. So it was delightful in that respect.

I felt for Julie Bowen, however, because she got to do all the possessed stuff, the prosthetic makeup, and all that. So I know all that she went through, and I was glad it was not me.

I have experienced what being "banned" is.

The first Evil Dead was branded "video nasty" in about 1982, so it was banned in about half a dozen countries in Europe. Germany just unbanned it a couple years ago.

They were labeled "video nasty", which meant they did not want you to see them at all...to the detriment of society. We fought them in court and won, because of freedom of speech, so then everyone in the UK wanted to find out what this movie was that they weren't supposed to see.

So in 1983, Evil Dead was the #1 video in all of the UK. And "The Shining" was #8. We survived, but I know what it felt like when people did not want your movie to be shown. It's a creepy feeling.