Sidekicks have been good to Bruce Campbell. We all wish he'd star in more Evil Dead movies or bring back Brisco County, Jr., but some of his greatest success was on Hercules and Xena or cameos in Spider-Man. So he took a gig as the hero's sidekick on Burn Notice.
Bruce Campbell on Burn Notice
"Sidekicks don't have to bring the medicine back to little Billy," said Campbell. "Sidekicks can make horrible mistakes and screw up and go get drunk and whatever they normally do. I get petty cash and beer money. It gives me something to do because otherwise I'm just hanging out with rich Miami women, and you know, how boring is that?"
When disavowed spy Michael Weston has to stay afloat in Miami, he enlists Sam (Campbell) to help him out. "These guys start off being very disenfranchised and hopefully during the course of the seasons, they'll get their act together and have a well-oiled system of helping little people out in the middle of their strange circumstances."
It sounds like Weston uses MacGyver-esque skills to solve little problems, but Campbell says there's more to it than that. "He's definitely like MacGyver. It's MacGyver-ish. It's a little more complicated than MacGyver in that theres's a lot of human aspects to it. It's not just wire and gadgets and stuff. It's do you care if he wires the gadget? Do you care if he succeeds? Those are fundamentally different concepts. It's one thing to have an action scene, but do you care about the people who are in the action scene? I think that's crucial."
With Sam, Weston picks up some comic relief in the process, particularly if Sam ever goes to the beach. "The good news is I don't care anymore and neither does the character. So it's like, yeah, he loves hanging by the pool and tanning. That's his character. Every episode we'll be doing something ridiculous, some sting operation, so covert operation where things go wrong. You know, things blow up in your face and get ugly and we have to lie, cheat and steal. It's perfect."
Campbell is so confident in the show that he's already thought ahead to future season arcs. "Oh yeah, it'll go five [seasons]. And then I'm done after five. My character will be dead after five. He'll get hit by a bus."
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