‘Sheriff Country’ Star Matt Lauria Shares Take on Playing a Cop After ‘CSI: Vegas’ (Exclusive)

Matt Lauria is going from crime scene investigator to cop.

The CSI: Vegas star will soon be seen as Nathan Boone on the upcoming Fire Country spinoff, Sheriff Country.

Lauria was cast back in April as the longtime partner of Morena Baccarin’s Sheriff Mickey Fox, who is a “smart, tough, and capable deputy” with a different style of law enforcement. This marks his return to CBS, having previously portrayed Josh Folsom on the CSI revival, CSI: Vegas, which was canceled after three seasons in 2024. Playing a CSI and a sheriff’s deputy are pretty different, as Lauria told PopCulture.com during CBS’ 2025 fall press event on Thursday.

“Well, it’s more fun to play with guns than it is to do field tests for, like, gun powder residue under the pressure with a camera in your face,” he explained. “These individuals who are real CSIs, obviously, it’s second nature to them, and they do it every day. But, you know, there’s a steep learning curve for getting the fingerprints off of meringue pie or whatever. You know what I mean? Like that.”

“But it’s funny to play kind of both sides because you can see how there’s a necessary relationship between those two aspects of law enforcement,” Lauria continued. “But whichever side you’re on, you probably have a pretty focused, myopic view of the job that needs to be done. And so now I’m on the other side of that, so it’s a different side of it.”

Premiering on Friday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, Sheriff Country also stars W. Earl Brown, Michele Weaver, and Christopher Gorham. It centers on Baccarin’s straight-shooting sheriff, the stepsister of Cal Fire’s division chief Sharon Leone (Diane Farr). “She investigates criminal activity while she patrols the streets of small-town Edgewater, contending with her ex-con father Wes (Brown), who is an off-the-grid marijuana grower, and a mysterious incident involving her wayward daughter.”

Sheriff Country is produced by CBS Studios. Fire Country creators Max Thieriot, Tony Phelan, and Joan Rater, Sheriff Country creator Matt Lopez, and Jerry Bruckheimer and KristieAnne Reed for Jerry Bruckheimer Television serve as executive producers. It should be entertaining to see Lauria in a cop role after he played a CSI. On top of that, there will be a lot to look forward to when Sheriff Country premieres in just over a month.