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When the Travel Channel announced a reboot of the popular "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" series many were surprised to learn that Bruce Campbell would be the host of the show. Though undoubtedly charismatic and familiar with working in front of a camera, Campbell is better now for acting in scripted stories as opposed to reality television. The opportunity to be a host speaking directly to a camera poses an opportunity, however, to return to his roots.
"My approach was Detroit, 1982. Seems like a weird answer, doesn't it? That's where I learned to work with tele-prompters and do infomercials. I got my Screen Actor's Guild card doing an infomercial for Chrysler to teach car sale's men how to sell the interiors of cars to people. No one will ever see it. You'll never see it. It got me trained for doing informational stuff in front of a camera. Normally acting is you ignore the camera. With this, you have to focus in on it because it's the audience. I'm coming back to where I started."
Campbell is naturally comedic in many of the roles he's best known for, and perhaps even more so when doing things like promotional media for his projects. He is more than prepared to tone this part of himself down when handling the sometimes sensitive nature of the show's more unusual subjects.
"My feeling is any actor needs to adapt to the material. It's the same with directors. A director shouldn't adapt the material to his or her style. It's the same with an actor. There's jokey material that I like doing but if you're talking about a guy who has a disability or whatever, you have to tame the snarkiness factor. You have to be respectful. We're celebrating these people. We're not looking at it like we're holding our nose. We're fascinated and amazed and impressed. That's our approach."
Regardless of whether or not the guests on the show have already shown their extraordinary features online before, Campbell elaborates that the show will do more to get to know the people in question.
"We found people who have already been found but we get to know them. These other stories, you've seen the footage but you haven't met them. That's the difference. We're getting into their lives, getting to know them, and therefore you can celebrate their success more because you know their story, what they struggled with, how they overcame it, especially if they have a disability. A lot of these people, something horrible happened or they were born a certain way and the fact that they overcome it is impressive as hell."
Watch the full press conference with Bruce Campbell here:
