Emily Deschanel‘s run on “Bones” almost ended in Season 1 instead of Season 12.
In a recent interview on David Duchovny’s “Fail Better” podcast, Deschanel recalled struggling to keep up during the first season of “Bones,” considering the demanding shooting hours and the copious amounts of dialogue she needed to memorize.
“We were working insane hours, longer than just a normal series,” Deschanel said. “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 added, “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.”
At the peak of the anxiety, an accident in Deschanel’s commute caused her to arrive 30 minutes late to set. The incident resulted in a stern talking to from series creator Hart Hanson.
“Hart knocked on my trailer door, which was not a usual thing, he wasn’t knocking on my door often,” she remembered. “He took me aside and says, ‘The studio has concerns about your work.’ They said that I was late and unprepared. That to me — I get emotional just thinking about it now because it was probably shame.”
“I mean, I was a wreck. I took it so hard,” she added. “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.”
Deschanel said that afterward, she made sure to always be on time. And luckily, the day after the conversation, she learned the show had been picked up for additional episodes. Hanson also helped his lead actress going forward, getting her a bigger trailer and more time to run lines.
“Hart helped me find ways to be better, get my job done in terms of learning my lines and remembering them,” Deschanel said. “A lot of it was having downtime or having some scene that I’m not in, etc. He’s just a good one. We were so lucky.”
“Bones” ran for 246 episodes across 12 seasons on Fox from 2005 to 2017. Starring alongside David Boreanaz, Michaela Conlin, T.J. Thyne and Tamara Taylor, Deschanel played Dr. Temperance Brennan, a genius anthropologist who uses the bones of victims to help the FBI solve homicide cases.