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Evil Dead Fans Want CM Punk To Replace Bruce Campbell As The New Ash

We might have seen the last of Bruce Campbell playing Ash in the Evil Dead movies, but even cult franchises have a tendency to steamroll on. Most fans would agree on the difficulty of finding someone who could bring the same combination of screen presence, physical capability and engaging personality, but some have put forward the suggestion of CM Punk to take up the chainsaw and boomstick.

the Evil Dead

We might have seen the last of Bruce Campbell playing Ash in the Evil Dead movies, but even cult franchises have a tendency to steamroll on. Most fans would agree on the difficulty of finding someone who could bring the same combination of screen presence, physical capability and engaging personality, but some have put forward the suggestion of CM Punk to take up the chainsaw and boomstick.

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His is a name with which you might not be familiar, as he’s not long been a genuine actor. Prior to this, he spent 15 years as a professional wrestler, where at one point he lasted well over a year as the WWE Champion after defeating John Cena, and left in 2014 to pursue a different path as an MMA fighter. After insidious horror film Girl On the Third Floor hit Netflix though, fans made a swift connection between its star and the deadite-slaying idiot.

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Punk’s transition to acting is a recent career turn that has also included fight commentary and comic book writing. In his wrestling days, he cameoed as himself in French comedy Queens of the Ring and animated Flintstones feature Stone Age Smackdown, but only properly began appearing in movies last year. He had a small role in Jen & Sylvia Soska’s remake of David Cronenberg’s sophomore horror feature Rabid, where he appeared as a nightclub predator picking the wrong target in the story’s newly vampiric protagonist.

As mentioned above, he was also the lead in Travis Stevens’ directorial debut, where he played a despicable excuse for a human being yet one also oddly compelling, and managed to maintain viewer interest in scenes where he had nobody to play off against and reacted credibly to being menaced by inexplicable supernatural occurrences, not entirely dissimilar to what an Evil Dead movie would require of him.

While it’s certainly a shame that we’ll never see more of Campbell in his iconic role, if the franchise must go on without him, then Sam Raimi could certainly do worse than bring on board someone swiftly making a name for himself within precisely the community to which a potential new Evil Dead movie would need to appeal.