Bruce Campbell has said that he has about five years to live after being diagnosed with cancer.
The Evil Dead star, 68, first shared the news with fans in March, writing on X that he had been diagnosed with a “treatable” but not “curable” form of cancer.
“I apologise if that’s a shock,” he wrote, “it was to me too.”
“I am not trying to enlist sympathy – or advice – I just want to get ahead of this information in case false information gets out, which it will. Fear not, I’m a tough old son-of-a-bitch and I have great support, so I expect to be around a while.”
Speaking on The Adam Carolla Show, Campbell called his current prognosis “a five-year deal”.
“With the type of cancer that I have, which I don’t want to get into, the current thing is a five-year deal,” Campbell said. “I’ve decided pretty specifically though to live with it, not die from it. Because you can go down a massive rabbit hole, the cancer rabbit hole is enormous. You can go into focus groups of 10,000 guys who have exactly what you have. I won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.”
In March, when Campbell first disclosed his diagnosis, he had said work would need “to take back seat to treatment”, and that he hoped to spend the summer “to get as well as I possibly can” to promote his film Ernie & Emma.
The movie, which Campbell wrote, directed, and produced with his wife Ida Gearon, follows a retired Oregon pear salesman named Ernie Tyler whose wife, Emma, leaves him a list of locations where she wants her ashes scattered.
“It’s a very fascinating timing of having a movie about a guy who’s spreading his wife’s ashes who died, made by a guy who’s dying,” Campbell, who also stars in the film, said.
In spite of his ill health, Campbell said he wanted to focus on life and work. “When I promote this movie, I have nothing. I’m free and clear when I promote this movie.”
“They say there's a whole mental component,” the actor added. “You start getting all this bad news and you are starting breakfast with a s*** sandwich with a side of what the f*** right? You have to make this decision of, ‘Oh okay, but do I ‘ve to stop everything I’m doing because of this?’ Well no. So, it’s a sort of whack-a-mole life, literally.”
“You don’t die from cancer, you die from what cancer does to you. It does weird shit and then you address it and move on.”
— Bruce Campbell (@GroovyBruce) March 3, 2026
Campbell is best known as the first actor to play Ash Williams in Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult classic horror film The Evil Dead. He portrayed the character in the subsequent entries of the franchise, Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992).
He also played Ash in three seasons of the TV series Ash vs Evil Dead, which ran between 2015 and 2018. Most recently appeared in a voice role in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
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