Bruce Campbell may be best-known for his starring role as Ash in the 'Evil Dead' trilogy of B horror movies, but he's finding a whole new group of followers as the gruff but likable Sam Axe in the USA Network series Burn Notice. And you can tell in his voice that he's digging not only the show, but the fact that he gets to spend time in Florida, where the series is shot, and where he revealed that "regular guy stuff" is how he unwinds.

"Florida is really flat, so I'm a bicyclist, not like a power bicyclist, I'm a tooler," he told us. "They’ve got a couple good bike paths around here ... And I'm a news freak, because I live in the world of unreality, I actually crave reality, so my reading material is the New York Times, and I watch the news, and basketball, because we're in basketball season..."

Burn Notice returns for its third season this Thursday night, and CinemaSpy had an opportunity to ask Campbell about the upcoming season. Before we get to that, however, let's clear away a few other "burning" issues likely on everyone's mind. First up, what's happening with 'Evil Dead'? Well, according to Campbell, there's really no sequel planned for the horror classic right now, but the remake is in the works, and Campbell expects his involvement this time to be primarily behind the camera.

"That's a cast of young people," he said re Evil Dead. "So I’ll be on as the producer but I won’t be in it other than playing the old guy at the bait store at the beginning. So there's nothing for me in that."  

Campbell also acknowledged that he won't be in the Bubba Ho-tep sequel. "I couldn’t come to an agreement with the director, Don Coscarelli, on a story, "Campbell acknowledged, "so I think it's going to be Ron Perlman in that."

Finally, what about Spider-Man 4? We all know that Sam Raimi has stated openly that he'd like Bruce to appear in some sort of a role, but does Campbell know anything about that yet?

"I’ll probably be in Spider-Man 4, but I never hear from Sam usually until the last minute, when they’ve got everything worked out," Campbell told us. "So we’ll just see what he's got up his sleeve."

And is Raimi a Burn Notice fan...? Because let's face it, if he's not, he ought to be.

"I don’t know that if he's watched the show, I don’t think he has," Campbell said. "I don’t think he's a big TV guy. He's very aware of the show because I keep tormenting him that we're like the number one show on cable, and whenever we're number one in something, whether it's Sam is number one at the box office or whatever, as friends, we always will send that needling e-mail saying 'Yeah, man, number one on cable.' Then he would send something of, 'Oh, yeah, Spider-Man, you know, we're number one for the opening weekend.' So we have a little bit of fun back and forth, so Sam is very aware of the show, whether he's seen it...you’ve got me."

Meanwhile, here's what Campbell had to say about the forthcoming season of Burn Notice:

Question: Can you tell us a bit about what direction we can see Sam going in this third season?

Bruce Campbell: Well, Sam by now is, we're now past the point where we don’t trust him. He's a hopefully valuable member of the team now, and so, like Michael Westen, Sam is taking the twists and turns as they come now. I don’t know that Sam is going to get married or any personal revelation. Sam is pretty much living in Michael’s mother’s house, a room in her house, so he's just kind of a permanent loser, at least in this season. And he's always there to help.

Question: How is Burn Notice different from past TV shows you’ve done?

Bruce Campbell: Well, the making of television is the same, it's very fast. You're doing between 6 and 11 pages per day, which is a lot.  Features probably do three pages.  Big features do one page a day. So that's not different. What's different, of course, is we're in Miami, which is a completely out of the box thing for me because I live in Oregon, at the complete opposite end of the country. So it's different in every way physically, and the dynamics are different. I’ve never really done a spy show before, so this is a first for me.  I did a western show, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., and I did a—well actually, no, I did a spy show, Jack of All Trades, where I played the very first spy, but this is, I guess, you'd say sort of modern day, realistic approach where it's not Hercules or Xena or something fantastic going on. What's different is also the subject matter. It's a fairly mature, adult sort of comedy/drama, with no fantastic special effects.

Question: About the Expo Center almost getting demolished recently—it sounds like you got a one-year reprieve to stay there for a while longer.

Bruce Campbell: We did, we got a one-year reprieve.

Question: How do you feel about that, and if the show had actually got up and moved, where would you have liked to have seen it go?

Bruce Campbell: Hypotheticals are tough and I don’t ever want to give any impressions that I don’t like shooting in Miami. It's good for the show. Miami is a character in this show, and if we moved it would probably be to California because it makes casting easier, all the writers live there, the actors, half of them live there. I live in Oregon, but it would be closer to my West Coast. I have kids there, too, so a lot of personal reasons.  

But for the sake of the show Miami is a good spot. It’s an unexploited city. Even CSI:  Miami doesn’t even shoot in Miami, they shoot in California, so we're it  We're the only show that is currently shooting in Miami, and the governor even came, Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida. It was great palling around with the governor for a day, trying to bend his arm a little bit, saying, "Hey, Gov, why don’t you help us out here?"  Because producers tend to go where it's the least expensive, and that's nothing against producers, every producer does that. So we have to see, as long as we can get incentives to stay in Florida, we’ll stay. But there's also the reality of, if we don’t then we’ll leave and fake it. Television is fake, so if we had to fake Florida we could.

Question: It’s interesting, the first episode that's showing up Thursday night, the way it was constructed, that it really ends up with Madeline talking to all three of you saying that as characters that you all three needed to work together to watch each other’s back, and it seems like Michael has the biggest target. Is that pretty much the whole theme as the season seems to evolve?

Bruce Campbell: I think so. It's going to get worse for Michael Westen this year, because of a couple of things that have happened as a result of the last two-parter. So his world is a little more unstable this year. He's not necessarily under the thumb of Carla any more. She was the evil temptress of the last season.

She's out of the way, but that's not necessarily a good thing. His sort of veil of protection has been lifted by these shadowy figures, so now anybody who wants to put a bullet into Michael Westen, which is actually a lot of people, I don’t know—so yes, we do have to stick together. In order to pull through, we’ve all got to be on the same page and watch each other’s back, including Madeline. So, yes, the interpersonal dynamics will get theoretically tighter because if things get worse, you’ve got to know who you can count on.

Question: How do you think that Sam compares to your other roles, and what is your favorite part of playing him?

Bruce Campbell: Boy, I like Sam because he's my age. He's, when I got the original script for the pilot, it said Sam Axe, who's 50 ... I thought, okay. I'm finally playing a mature adult who doesn’t have to, he's an ex-Navy Seal, he's tacking around now, he's trying to get laid and drink beer. And I love the fact that all three characters on this show are sort of damaged goods.

Sam has his issues, Michael has his issues, Fiona has her issues, mostly anger issues. And he's a character that, to me, feels like an old slipper.  He's not stiff.  He doesn’t use all the same terminology. He uses slang.  He's a little bit laid back. He's wearing Tommy Bahama all the time. And to me, I love the fact that there's a character who's that lackadaisical. But at the same time, he can look up anybody; he's got friends for days, he always knows a guy who knows a guy. So hopefully it's just a guy that you'd want to pal around with, but yet these guys are very tactical when they want to be.

And ... he's actually more similar to real guys than not. I’ve talked to a bunch of ex-police officers who watch the show, and they like the fact that we're capturing the human side of spies. Everybody knows James Bond, he's the greedy tough guy, but no one really knows what he's like, and no one ever really knows what his relationship is with his mother. In this show, you get to know that; I think it's great.