Bruce Campbell has revealed an animated Evil Dead series is in the works, with Campbell returning to the role of Ash Williams in voice form.
Campbell revealed the news to Entertainment Weekly while promoting his Peacock series Hysteria!
“We are developing an animated version, like a series,” Campbell told Entertainment Weekly. “I’ll do that. I’ll do Ash’s voice all day long because my voice hasn’t aged as much as I have.”
The last time Campbell played Ash in live-action was 2015, when Ash vs. Evil Dead was canceled after three seasons. He’s since voiced the character in Evil Dead: The Game, but he’s effectively retired from live-action Ash. Doing an animated series helps make things easier to slip back into it.
“We’re out of the cabin, Sam [Raimi] doesn’t have to direct, I don’t have to star as Ash,” Campbell said. “The trick is to take the elements that people like, which is innocent people being tortured by a malicious entity, and it’s people who have no skills to stop it.”
Evil Dead rises again and again
But live-action Evil Dead is still very much on the menu sans Ash. Two Evil Dead movies are currently in the pipeline. One from Sébastien Vaniček, who directed the killer spider thriller Infested, and the other from Francis Galluppi, who made his directorial bow this year with the fantastic The Last Stop in Yuma County.
Last year saw the first Evil Dead movie in a decade with Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. I starred Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland in a tale of three siblings who find an ancient vinyl that gives birth to bloodthirsty demons that run amok in a Los Angeles apartment building and thrust them into a primal battle for survival as they face the most nightmarish version of family imaginable.
Bruce Campbell will next feature in the Satanic Panic TV series Hysteria! It follows a struggling high school heavy metal band of outcasts who use the town’s sudden interest in the occult to start a reputation as a Satanic metal band, until a strange series of events triggers a witch hunt that leads back to them.
