If he had to it to all over again, actor Bruce Campbell wouldn’t have used his name in for the upcoming movie, “My Name is Bruce.”
“We probably should not have called him ‘Bruce Campbell,'” Campbell told SciFi Wire. “It created an extra layer of distress in people’s minds where they were tormented with why we went so far, if he was Bruce Campbell.”
In the film, Campbell plays a divorced egotist who carries around headshots to distribute to fans while he answers their questions about “Ellen” and “Serving Sara.” Campbell said that while the two share the same name, the character on-screen is a created one and not actually the actor’s own personality.
“Hopefully, if you strip the ‘Bruce Campbell’ aspect out of it, it would hopefully function as your basic premise: Loser actor hired because he’s thought of as something else and turns out to be his worst nightmare come true,” the real Campbell said. “So it’s still a hero’s journey. The movie hero has to learn how to be a real hero or attempt thereof.”
“Really, it’s based on a comic that Mark Verheiden read years ago,” Campbell said. “There was an old ’40s comic book called ‘The Adventures of Alan Ladd’, where he was kidnapped by some people because he was in a couple of swashbuckling movies, to help them fight pirates. So he thought, ‘Let’s do a strange demented spin on top of that.’ That’s the initial kernel of the idea.”
Actors creating fictional personas for themselves under their real name is nothing new. Actors in the golden age of radio did this, including Jack Benny, whose radio character shared his name. The Benny character was seen as a miser, vain and self-centered, something which could never be said of the actual Jack Benny.
Indiana Jim says
Tongue planted firmly in cheek. People know Bruce Campbell is 7 cans in a 6-pack of sheer awesome.