I have always been a sucker for a good procedural, and Bones is one of my favorites. I discovered the show sometime during its fifth or sixth season, when I was also deep in my Castle era. I quickly caught up via Netflix, and then read all of the Kathy Reichs books, which I’d buy during my lunch breaks at Borders Books (RIP, bring back bookstores!). I loved that the character, Temperance “Bones” Brennan was an assertive, self-assured woman. I thought the whole cast was great, particularly Emily Deschanel as Bones and Michaela Conlin as Angela.
Emily just appeared as a guest on David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast. The whole premise of Fail Better is to look ”into the way that failure looms over all of us and really shapes who we are.” David is a good host that’s really able to get his guests to open up. During Emily’s interview, she talked about the difficult time that she had during the early days of filming Bones. Her intense filming schedule ended up causing panic attacks.
Emily Deschanel recalled struggling emotionally and professionally while filming the first season of Fox‘s Bones, to the point where she got a talking-to about her lack of preparedness.
In a recent episode of podcast Fail Better with host David Duchovny, who once directed an episode of the police procedural, Deschanel opened up about the pain point and how her diagnosis of ADHD and dyslexia as a child affected her career later on.
“We were working insane hours, longer than just a normal series,” Deschanel began. “You’re working 14- to 16-hour days, and then I had to memorize the lines. So I’d be staying up late night memorizing lines. I would joke that I would go home and just cry in a bathtub every night because I was just so overwhelmed.”
She continued, “I’d come to set and I would be trying to remember the lines that — I got no sleep and trying to remember the lines that I had memorized the night before and then I had them in my head and couldn’t remember them.”
Deschanel said moments like that would result in “tunnel vision” and feel “exposing” in front of crew members and other peers who were dependent on her performance to get through shoot days.
“I didn’t know I was having panic attacks, but I was basically having panic attacks at the time,” she recalled.
And when Deschanel was once 30 minutes late to work because of an accident on her commute, series creator Hart Hanson was forced to deliver a harsh message from his superiors.
“Hart knocked on my trailer door, which was not a usual thing, he wasn’t knocking on my door often,” she remembered, chuckling ruefully. “He took me aside and said, ‘The studio has concerns about your work.’ They said that I was late and unprepared. And that to me — I get emotional just thinking about it now because it was probably shame [that I was feeling].”
Continuing tearfully, she said, “I mean, I was a wreck … I took it so hard, and I was such a fragile person at the time. I got hardened up doing that show for so long. I was not sleeping, I was so stressed out. I was already, I’m an emotional person, so I was just beside myself.”
However, Deschanel said the moment served as a wake-up call of sorts in that she was never late to set again. The following day Bones was also picked up for more episodes, with the eventual tally for the 12-season series comprising 246 episodes from 2005 through 2017.
Deschanel added that she was able to get through the long-running series after Hanson offered her practical “support,” such as by getting someone to run lines with her and a bigger trailer to match costar David Boreanaz’s.
“Hart helped me find ways to be better, get my job done in terms of learning my lines and remembering them, and a lot of it was having downtime or having some scene that I’m not in, et cetera. He’s just a good one. We were so lucky,” she concluded.
I found myself nodding along to basically everything Emily shared. Actually, I’m such an empath that I felt a little anxious on her behalf as she was talking about it. It sounds like it was a really stressful situation until she was able to advocate for herself and get into a decent work/life rhythm. I’m really glad that she was able to work with Hart to find ways to improve the situation. I have suffered from anxiety for as long as I can remember, and even though I’ve gotten treatment and given myself tools to deal with it over the years, I can still get overwhelmed and feel that shame spiral she mentions. Having ADHD also doesn’t help! On the days when you feel off your rhythm, it can be a perfect storm.
Oh, and I can’t believe that Emily didn’t start off on Bones with a trailer that was the same size as Boreanaz’s. She was playing the title character, FFS. A decent-sized trailer should have been an automatic perk. All of this talk about Bones has me hankering for a rewatch. I watched the original run until the bitter end, ha. I think I’m going to have to revisit it during the TV lull this summer.
Photos credit: Enzo Fornino/Avalon, Dennis Van Tine/Avalon, Christina Radish/Avalon, Getty
That sounds like a really tough time. ADHD and dyslexia made things difficult, of course.
But how much of her difficulty coping and keeping up comes down to TPTB requiring her to work an insane schedule – 14-16 hr days, while being expected to memorize lines in her off hours, no wonder she was lacking sleep. And her character had the most dense, jargony lines of any on that show, episode after episode. AND TPTB treating her from the jump as “less than” her costar.
I can’t imagine the awful feeling of doing your best, the most that is humanly possible for anyone, much less someone with ADHD and dyslexia and knowing it’s not enough. And then having the hammer come down on you on a day where it wasn’t even your fault (a traffic accident) and you just take it because of the accumulated shame and exhaustion.
Thank goodness Hart decided to support his show’s star and provide at least some of the tools she needed to succeed. She’s great in that role, and she seems like a decent human being.
Plus all my sympathy to her at the prospect of a lifetime of the Property Brothers at every family gathering.
She probably didn’t get the same size trailer because, despite being the co-lead, David Boreanz was the bigger name at the time.
IIRC too Bones was her first series and can totally understand being that stressed. That show did not have easy breezy “normal” language and dialogue plus being an hour vs 30 minutes, I’d imagine it would be a lot for any actor.
Yea but a male lead would have used that to negotiate the biggest trailer. Agents never advocate for their female actors as much as for their male ones.
The main thing I got from that was how the system she was working in was just casually set up to not take care of their performers until they started to crack. The showrunner/director knew they were doing 14-16 hour days and that the lines were complex and full of jargon. Emily should not have had to get to that point before she got support and better accommodation.
I loved Bones, even to the “bitter” end (you’re so spot on about that!) Rewatching is interesting — the mid-aughts were such a strange time, and I know that the show thought it was *eating* with some of it’s more “progressive” stances. I look at it as a time-capsule that way — it’s copaganda, for sure, but it did find ways to push back from time to time, both gently and forcefully.
I’ve heard Emily talk about the first season before — she was also facing a lot of studio pressure to look a certain way and it really affected her. Hearing that she was also being incredibly overworked and unsupported in other ways isn’t a surprise. I’m glad that the production team became more supportive over time, but I hate that it wasn’t that way from the get-go. But that’s true of most jobs when we work for other people; it usually takes a while to establish appropriate boundaries, and if we’re lucky, we’re surrounded by a team of people who are open to understanding our needs. I’m in a lucky position right now, but I have had jobs where literally no one cared that I was drowning. It’s a horrible feeling.
Bones not only had great chemistry amongst the cast and fun stories but I liked the religious aspects. Booth was unapologetically Catholic and it was a big part of his life while Bones was adamantly atheist. I liked that we saw both aspects and neither was better than the other. The two respected each other’s viewpoint even if they strongly disagreed.
I also appreciate that with one exception, the cast that started the series ended it. I am easily heartbroken by favorite characters leaving long running shoes, and that just didn’t happen with Bones, except for that one time we won’t talk about.
She and Carla Gallo on their podcast Boneheads have talked about this in depth and from different angles as well over the course their first season of the podcast and when Hart Hanson guested, it was so interesting to hear his perspective on it. highly recommend their podcast!