The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. - Cast

Cast

Bruce Campbell went through five auditions for the role of Brisco before he was hired. In his first audition with the casting director, Campbell spontaneously did a standing flip. The stunt impressed the casting director so much that during each subsequent audition, Campbell was asked to do the flip again. In his final audition, Campbell assured the network executives that if hired for the role, he would work hard to make the show a success. In an interview, Campbell said, "It's every actor's dream to play a cowboy, so when this opportunity came up, I mean, yeah, where do I sign?" He added that working on Brisco provided him with acting opportunities he would not have otherwise had. Cuse said getting Campbell "was just one of those collisions between an actor and a script that was just perfect ... I can't imagine Brisco having ever existed without him." Writing in Auxiliary Magazine, Luke Copping claimed that Brisco was Campbell's "last great" role before the actor fell into "a period of self-parody and overt camp that he did not redeem himself from until joining the cast of Burn Notice".

Christian Clemenson went to Harvard with Cuse but still went through the normal audition channels to get the part of Poole. Clemenson was apprehensive about pursuing one of the lead roles in a television show because of the long time commitments involved. He later said, "The similarities between this show and The Wild Wild West, and my character to that show's Artemus Gordon, was an important hook for me. It was one of my favorite shows growing up, and as soon as I saw that Brisco County was based on the same kind of material and attitude as that show, I called my agent and said, 'I'll do anything I have to do to get this.'" Clemenson applied his experiences at Ivy League schools to play the uptight Poole. Praising Clemenson's work on Brisco, Cuse said, "You can't give him anything he's not capable of doing. He adds the voice of intelligence and caution to balance our cast".

Julius Carry saw great potential in the character of Bowler. He had researched black cowboys for a project in college and used that knowledge in his portrayal of Bowler. Carry said that Bowler was similar to the real-life black deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, in that "Reeves always got his man and would often pull off incredible tricks to bring people in." Carry knew Clemenson from the time they worked together on the Western television pilot Independence. He had no knowledge of Campbell, but approved of the choice for the leading man after watching Army of Darkness. He later told Starlog, "I saw that he would be very good with the physical stuff and that he could deliver a one-liner. I knew the situation would be good." The original direction for Bowler was to have him constantly oppose Brisco, but as the series progressed the writers saw the good-natured chemistry between the actors and decided to make Brisco and Bowler a team. Bowler's race was never an issue in the show. According to Cary Darling, a television critic, this attitude is different from serious Westerns and "may hew more to the truth than one might think". He said historians have noted that black cowboys were common and that conflicts with white cowboys were rare.

Kelly Rutherford's portrayal of Dixie Cousins, with her emphasis on innuendo and subtext, has been described as "less Miss Kitty (Gunsmoke) than Mae West". Rutherford said that playing Dixie allowed her to fulfill her "fantasy of being Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles." When John Astin was cast he was best known for his portrayal of Gomez Addams in The Addams Family. Cuse said that he and the writers enjoyed paying homage to the television star of their childhoods: "For us, it was like, 'Oh wow, we get to meet John Astin in the guise of employing him on this show!'"