Hunter Doohan Lights Up Evil Dead Burn
The Wednesday star on jumping head-first into one of horror’s most brutal franchises, how Tim Burton helped him hone the craft of acting in genre film, and why gay men love a final girl
by Lana Thorn 7 July 2026
Photography by Elizaveta Porodina
Hunter Doohan deserves a comedy. Between starring opposite Bryan Cranston in the harrowing thriller series Your Honor, playing a masked serial killer on Daredevil: Born Again, and leading and producing troubled teen industry drama The Wilderness, the 32-year-old American actor has made dark material a close companion. “I keep joking that I probably should do something lighter,” he tells me from his apartment in Dublin as he films the third season of Wednesday, Netflix’s smash-hit Addams Family reimagining that introduced the actor to audiences around the globe as the complex villain Tyler. But if a rom-com was ever on the mind, Doohan found himself in New Zealand last year shooting the exact opposite of a “lighter” project: an Evil Dead movie.
Doohan calls me over Zoom two weeks after we briefly met during the rush of his cover photoshoot in London. Keeping on theme with his new film, he’s navigating a Dublin heatwave, making plans to pick up a plug-in cooling tower for his bedroom after the interview. Bright-eyed and smiling as he discusses one of the most gut-wrenchingly gory studio releases ever, I ask him whether his recent work reflects a personal interest in the genre. “It’s definitely something I’ve got into more as I’ve gotten older,” he laughs. “I remember going to see The Grudge growing up and being way too young to watch it. I was with friends, and I really wanted to leave, but was too embarrassed to. But I love horror now. ”
Jacket & Trousers Jean Louie Castillo
Luckily, Doohan had discovered that love by the time the opportunity came to audition for Evil Dead Burn last summer. Nesting the franchise’s signature gruesome pleasures in a family drama, the sixth instalment, which hits theatres 45 years after the premiere of Sam Raimi’s original, follows a traumatised widow, Alice (Souheila Yacoub), who joins her in-laws to grieve the loss of her husband, Will (George Pular) — before Deadites crash the grim reunion. The funeral-goers include Will’s mother (Tandi Wright), father (Erroll Shand), and grandmother (Maude Davey), with his brother, Joseph (Doohan), providing the link to previous films as he uncovers their grandfather’s connection to Professor Knowby from Evil Dead II and unwraps the Book of the Dead. “I love this franchise,” he beams. “I had already seen the Fede Álvarez film and Evil Dead II, but because my character is looking into his grandfather’s research, I felt really encouraged to dive into the lore. I finished every film before I was done with the audition process and was checking out Ash vs Evil Dead as well.”
Beyond the world of Evil Dead, Doohan had some useful supplementary viewing under his belt. As a Friday-night home screening to unwind after a day of shooting Wednesday Season 2, he had watched Sébastien Vaniček’s social horror creature feature Vermines (Infested), a blistering debut that caught the attention of producers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert and EP Bruce Campbell. “That really excited me,” Doohan recalls. “To get the audition and already be aware of him as a filmmaker. If you hear ‘spider movie’, you could think you know what that’s gonna be. But he goes so deep into the characters and the grief.” He knew that Vaniček could balance genre thrills with moving character work, and that he would have the chance to deliver the kind of horror film performance that resonates with him. “I always feel drawn to the ones that have a real emotional truth to them. I loved all the performances in Hereditary, and Neve Campbell in the original Scream.”
Shirt John Richmond. Brooch & Necklace Gillian Horsup at Alfie’s Antiques. Trousers Saint Laurent. Shoes Contemporary Wardrobe.
Vaniček is the third director to put his stamp on the franchise in the wave of reboots following Raimi’s original trilogy. Where Fede Álvarez brought a bleak ferocity to the addiction parable of Evil Dead, and Lee Cronin gave Evil Dead Rise a mean-spirited sense of play, the French filmmaker makes his film equal parts petrifying and emotionally devastating, with a style defined by distinctively jumpy editing and an unrelenting pace. Doohan credits Raimi’s team at Ghost House Pictures with keeping the series fresh. “Sam Raimi and all the producers take such good care of the franchise, honouring Sam’s original film while giving each director room to do their own take on it.”
As for Vaniček’s emphasis on character moments, the director’s approach to building backstories gelled well with Doohan’s own working habits. “There’s so much we talked about that informs the character that isn't even quite on screen,” he says. “And I always try to come up with little secrets for myself that help me get where I need to be emotionally.” For Joseph, a writer who can’t crack his first novel after several false starts, that unspoken backstory is grounded in the overwhelming burden of his family legacy, whether that’s the dilapidated house that he’s inherited, the spectre of his grandfather (whose research he’s using as inspiration for his book), or his fraught relationship with a father that considers him a disappointment compared to his dead brother. That unpleasant dynamic comes to a head in an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner scene, shot over three days, after Joseph’s father is the first to be turned into a Deadite. “It was so fun to play those little moments where we don’t know that he’s possessed yet,” he grins. “I loved showing that slow realisation that everything he learned from his grandfather's research is happening.”
Top & Trousers Jean Louie Castillo
If those character-building conversations with Vaniček were defined by exhaustive detail, Doohan notes that the filmmaker’s communication on set is less elaborate. “It’s funny because he’s French and can be quite blunt when directing,” he laughs. “But it became a really fun way to work because you knew once you had gotten a version he wanted.”
Doohan credits another director, Tim Burton, with preparing him for playing the emotional weight of any given scene amidst the carnage of Evil Dead Burn. “To get to work on Wednesday with Tim, who does these fantasy projects with horror elements, has just been a dream come true,” he beams. “Tim and Jenna [Ortega] are so good at grounding themselves in these worlds that have larger-than-life stakes and fantastical elements. He directs by thinking of the cut already in his head, and Sébastien is similar: a lot of the time, we’re just catching little moments, and you have to dive right into the height of whatever scene for this one little piece. Tim taught me about how technical it is to make something like this come to life on screen.”
Cape Atsuko Kudo. All Tights Falke.
When I ask him about a particularly technically complex set piece, a memorable sequence that takes place in a car, Doohan puts a hand to his mouth. “Oh, God,” he exclaims. “It was really fun — but it was crazy. We had to do rehearsals with the stunt team because there was so much choreography. That was one of the scenes in the script that really excited me, but then we were trapped in that car for so many days. Everyone knows car scenes are hard already. It’s such a tight space, and to capture each of those moments, you’re in-and-out, because the camera and the other actors have to fit in there. It was so much about hyping yourself up before you jump into the moment to keep up the intensity.”
That scene is one of many similarly chaotic sequences, as Evil Dead Burn leaves its audience — and its actors — little time to breathe. “Once the shit hits the fan, this film is relentless and nonstop,” Doohan smiles. “And there is no such thing as a typical day on an Evil Dead set. Other than the fact that every day we’re showing up and thinking, Oh, my God, we have another crazy fucking scene to shoot. I remember I had this quieter moment with Tandi in the attic, and we were like, ‘Whoa, this is weird — we’re just doing a dialogue scene.’”
Coat Adolf Maldonado
If that conversation in the attic has an antithesis, it is a near-nauseating moment of practical effects in which Joseph has to smash another character’s head, which almost didn’t get past the censors. “That had to be cut down severely because it kept giving us an NC-17 rating,” he explains. “It came down to a certain number of smashes to get it to an R.” Due to the technical complexity, Doohan fought to ensure that he was the one doing the smashing in the scene. “We had a limited number of takes because they had built these replicas of [the victim’s] head, and they were nervous because we had to get it right. At first, they were thinking maybe my stunt double, who's amazing, would do it, but it's such an emotionally charged moment that I was like, ‘No, I won’t miss — please let me do it.’ Getting to do something so practical and tactile really helped bring it all together for me. And those takes were long because even though it was a fake head, it was difficult to fully smash it.” In a later, equally gnarly scene, Doohan gets his face shoved into the remains of the shattered skull. “The heads were filled with blood and pieces of bananas for brains,” he laughs. “They tasted sweet.”
The stand-out sequence will have horror fans thinking of a similar scene in Curry Barker’s indie horror phenomenon Obsession, which was a recent favourite of Doohan’s. “I’ll take any comparison,” he says. “That movie’s amazing.” While he labels Inde Navarrette “a star”, he also singles out Michael Johnston’s performance as the unsavoury protagonist, which he feels doesn’t get quite as much recognition as it deserves. “I want to make sure to mention him, because he’s so good in it. It can be hard to play a character you don’t like. And I loved the conversation around the movie, too, especially coming from a young male director, about taking away someone’s autonomy.”
Cape Comme Des Garçons From Rellik
Jacket Contemporary Wardrobe. Shirt Ann Demeulemeester. Brooch & Necklace Gillian Horsup at Alfie’s Antiques.
Through all the blood, guts, and head-smashing, Doohan loved his three months in New Zealand. The shoot allowed him to see his extended family (his father is the late Australian tennis player Peter Doohan) and saw him bond with his co-stars Souhelia Yacoub and Luciane Buchanan, who plays Joseph’s girlfriend. “We had so much fun on and off set,” he recalls. “I just love them, and I’m excited to see them this week because we’re starting press together. Sou is just so badass, and Luciane is amazing. Her little hand movements and subtle eyebrow raise with the headrest scene? When I saw it on the monitor, I was like ‘Oh, this is so fucking good.’”
Since we’re dealing with an Evil Dead movie, it’s no spoiler to say that Joseph’s relationship with Luciane is somewhat doomed, but Doohan’s personal life is a great deal happier. He married his longtime partner, film producer and lawyer Fielder Jewett, in a 2022 ceremony officiated by his Your Honor co-star Bryan Cranston. While he once felt pressure to hide his sexuality to book roles, he credits the likes of Jonathan Bailey with normalising openly gay actors taking on a wide variety of roles — and in fact, he has only played straight characters so far. Still, he has joked that he did face a very unique form of discrimination on the set of Wednesday, quipping to Just for Variety that it might have been “a hate crime” that he was one of the few cast members who didn’t get to meet Lady Gaga.
Jacket & Trousers Steve O Smith. Brooch Gillian Horsup at Alfie’s Antiques.
Doohan has found that queer people especially connect to Burton’s work for his interest in outsider narratives, and there’s a similar element at play in their relationship to horror cinema. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot,” he reflects. “Queer audiences, we all just really connect to horror movies, from the classic misunderstood monsters to queer-coded things like Dracula. It can be specific, like Leviticus or It Follows, or even the trope in 80s horror movies where if a character had any sort of sexuality on screen, they were punished for it and killed. There’s maybe some of that stuff underneath the attraction, but then also, I like a badass final girl. That’s just always going to get the gays excited.”
As we wrap our discussion and Doohan prepares to return to work on Wednesday, the actor is understandably sworn to secrecy regarding the upcoming third season. Nevertheless, he does share his excitement regarding the new arrivals, which include Burton regulars Eva Green and Winona Ryder. “The new cast is insane,” he teases. “It’s so cool that it happens every season on the show — these legends joining, along with new, younger actors. I’m excited for everyone to see how they all fit into the world.”
Before he takes off to buy that much-needed plug-in cooling tower, I revisit the point about wanting to explore lighter material, asking who he wants to collaborate with next. While he concedes a breezier role might do him good, his answers about dream directors (Curry Barker and Ari Aster) make one thing clear: this scream king in the making isn’t going anywhere.
This cover story is part of Phantasmag’s summer 2026 print issue, available to pre-order now.
Evil Dead Burn is in US and UK cinemas from July 10th.
Photographer Elizaveta Porodina
Produced by Concrete Rep
Lighting Director Josef Beyer
Photo Assistants Jordan Lee, Jake Buckley
Stylist Nathan Henry
Styling Assistant Johnny McCaragher, Rachel Allison
On-Set Producer Thea Charlesworth @ TheArcade
Groomer Nadia Altinbas
Set Designer Julia Dias
Set Assistants Sam Edyn, Brad Barrett, Nicholas Rogers, Evie Wilkins