Bruce Davison Talks Along Came the Devil 2, Vincent Price, and the X-Men Legacy

Last month, Along Came the Devil 2 continued the indie horror franchise that stars X-Men and Willard veteran Bruce Davison in the role of Reverend Michael, a preacher who finds himself battling the forces of evil and standing between satanic power and the end of the world. In the film, “after receiving an unsettling voicemail, Jordan (Wiggins) returns home, looking for answers, only to find her estranged father and even more questions. A demonic force has attached itself to the town and no one is safe. The only one who seems to know anything is the small town’s Reverend.”

Davison is joined in the film by Laura Wiggins, Tiffany Fallon, Mark Ashworth, and more. It was directed by Jason DeVan, who did the 2013 fan film John Stewart: Rise of the New Lantern.

Davison recently joined ComicBook.com to talk about Along Came the Devil 2, out on streaming video on demand platforms now.

At this point in your career between your general look and your voice and your body of work, you I think have built up a reputation as a guy who can play these kinds of authoritative characters. Do you actively seek out the variant of those where you can experiment a little and have it be slightly different?

I’ll tell you, it’s a lot simpler than that. You get older and you get typecast in different parts. And when I was young, I was a young weirdo for awhile for Willard and the rats, and the X-Men comes along and you’re typecast as the authoritarian Senator, and something else comes along and you’re the crazy professor. So, I really just go where I’m kicked. And as we get older, those are the parts. You’re playing the Reverend and the guys that are supposed to be authoritarian, that have kind of some knowledge of the world just happens as you get older.

Well, is there something that attracts you to a franchise like this?

I did the original one when I met the producers, the DeVans. And I really loved them, they’re a delightful family. They make mom and pop movies on their own bucks and do it. Family does the catering, and everybody’s involved. And I really enjoyed working with them out of Buford, Georgia. And so it was a nice opportunity to go back and be part of their family again.

So that’s basically why I’m working with them on this one. And I just, I’ve gotten to the point where I like to do independent films. They’re the most fun. Corporate ones come along for a while, but 25 people deciding what’s going to sell this year, that’s a whole other bag than flying by the seat of your pants doing an independent film.

When you’re doing something like this where it is a sequel, is it hard for you to kind of — I don’t want to say stay interested, because obviously that’s your job and you’re good at it — but do you as an actor try to kind of differentiate this film, or try to track where your character has gone in the intervening years, so that you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same thing again?

Yeah, you try to have consistency. What is this character’s journey? And we kicked that around a lot, back and forth. Jason had some ideas, I had others, and he sort of comes up with what he thinks is going to work best for the film. I’m just a character in the film; it’s basically his story. So he’s going to carry it the way he’s going to want to do that. You get more of an opportunity to be collaborative in something when you’re working with a writer-director and people that are hands on. At the moment, I’m about to start another one with another writer-director and I’m looking forward to that.

Do you feel like working in independent film, you end up doing a lot of horror because that’s where there’s still a market for it, or is that just my perception because I work in the genre space?

I think that’s more your perception. I got to meet Vincent Price and I got to be friends with him, and I just loved what he did. And his advice was, he said he enjoyed doing the Hammer films and the Doctor Phibes and all of those more than anything else in his life. He really enjoyed his time as a contract player and everything else, but where he really enjoyed himself was in the grand scheme of being what became Vincent Price. And I always admired that, and it always appealed to me.

In that vein, are there any kinds of filmmakers in the independent space that you kind of look at and go, “Yeah, one of these days I’m going to find a way to work with that guy.”

Everybody that comes along. I certainly have heroes. I grew up with Scorsese and people like that and Spielberg and all of those people, but more or less worked with most of them. But I don’t know, there’s always somebody else coming along that’s kind of exciting. Whoever has got a new idea, a new story, and a new way of looking at the world and making their movies. So I’m very grateful at my age to still be working. It’s been quite an opportunity to still be kicking around. The roles have changed.

I still have some corporate opportunities, but what I enjoy most I think are the independent films. There’s less pressure to succeed in a way that is under a big corporate thumb. I find that enjoyable.

As someone who was there at the very beginning, I actually asked Rebecca Romijn recently, as somebody who was there from the very beginning with the X-Men franchise, what do you make of the nonstop barrage of superhero film and TV now? Is that something you’d ever want to go back to?

Well, I’d go where I’m kicked. I’m a character actor and some parts or something. They got a big payday or something, I’ll go back and do it. But for the most part I like the first two X-Men and after that they sort of just kept blowing shit up and stuff. So it didn’t quite appeal as much to me, but I’m glad I was there at the beginning. It was a new idea at the time. That started once again a new idea following superheroes. Superman was a new idea when Chris [Reeve] was doing that and that came along. But there aren’t that many ideas that people come up with that are original and at the time X-Men was original. It had an original take on characters and life and it was like something new. It was new. But like all of those genres, they eventually wear out.

This kind of series always has the potential to do sequels and prequels and all kinds of other kind of things. Is this a world that you’d be open to coming back to?

Well, we’ll see. See what happens, see what they come up with. I’m wide open to any possibilities and then I can always say, “Ah, I’ve got something else down the road.” But maybe we’ll make something entirely different. I’d love working with the DeVans. They’re great people.