EVIL DEAD Reboot Director Fede Alvarez Shares Details on The Sequel and Talks About Ash's Appearance
Director Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead reboot actually turned out to be a great horror movie! I loved how that ended up turning out and I really wanted to see that story continue. But, it wasn’t meant to be.
At the very end of the film, Bruce Campbell made a cameo as Ash giving fans hope that we would see a sequel in which Ash and Jane Levy’s Mia teamed up for some kind of soul swallowing adventure.
In a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Alvarez says that he had planned to have Ash actually appear in the film’s epilogue, sharing the screen with Mia. In the extended cut of the film, Mia is picked up on the road by a truck driver after her horrifying ordeal. That truck driver was supposed to be Ash Williams. He says:
“The true story was… I wanted Bruce Campbell to be that guy, I wanted Ash to be the guy that picks her up.”
Ultimately, Campbell is the one who shot down the idea. Alvarez goes on to say:
“I shot it in a way that was very simple for me to get Bruce and get him to do the cameo at the end. But then Bruce was like – and he was totally right – ‘I just feel like it’s gonna be like I’m the milkman and just show up…and I think that’s not special.’ [Bruce] was right, it was very hard to give a real reason why Ash will show up, and a coincidence that Ash would drive by and find a dying Mia. So, he decided not to do it. I did do a mock-up of it. So there’s a version of that ending, with Bruce’s face glued to [the truck driver’s face].”
In regards to the cameo Campbell made at the end of the film, where he exclaims, “Groovy,” Alvarez explains how that all went down. He didn’t really give Campbell much of a choice:
“One day I just show up with a very small camera and was like, ‘Come with me, Bruce.’ I took the lamp from my desk, I put it behind him and another in front of him, and he’s like, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ I was like, ‘We’re doing your cameo in the movie!’ And he’s like, ‘You’re kidding?!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re going to be in the movie and you’re going to be standing there, and you’re just going to look at me for a second and just say groovy.’ It was a very low budget shot.”
The filmmaker goes on to talk about the sequel he was planning with Mia. They were all gung-ho at first, it was going to happen. They came up with a full story that would bring together Ash and Mia, but when the Ash Vs. Evil Dead TV show happened, that all fell apart:
“We started writing a sequel [right away] – thinking about what the sequel is going to be. We all agreed it was going to happen. Rodo [Sayagues] and I started thinking about it. We had the full story and then basically, it was strange…the whole intention was to do that, to team [Ash and Mia] up. That was always the goal, but I think Sam had different goals. Sam wanted to have Bruce back for the TV show that came out a few years after that. It was complex to make the movie at the time and whatever mythology we were going to create with them, and it would have been complicated for the show because Sam had his own ideas of what would happen to Ash, and he wanted to tell that story. So that’s why…it [ended up] not happening.”
It’s a bummer that the sequel didn’t happen, but it makes sense as to why it didn’t. At least we got that great TV series! Alvarez went on to reveal that he’s played with the idea of Ash and Mia being related:
“We did have a lot of intentions of doing that. And she still might be related. If she is, she doesn’t know. We had a very complex character past for [Mia]. And David. They were siblings but they had different parents – different fathers. So yes, they might be related.”
I’d be cool with that! It’d be interesting to see if that’s something that we might see down the road. There is a new Evil Dead movie in development with a new director. That film will most likely not be connected to Alvarez’s film.