Emily Deschanel made “insanely” long days on the set of the TV series Bones and almost succumbed to it, the 48-year-old actress says in the podcast Fail Better by colleague David Duchovny.
“We made insanely long days, longer than the average series. We worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and I had to remember all my text. So I stayed up late into the night to learn my text,” says Deschanel. “I would arrive on set and try to remember my text, but I hadn’t slept. It was in my head, but it didn’t come out.”
One day, Deschanel was thirty minutes late to the set due to an accident, after which she was sternly addressed by producer Hart Hanson. “He said I was late and unprepared. I still get emotional about it now,” says the actress. “I was a wreck, it hit so hard. I was such a fragile person then. I got tougher because I played in the series for so long.”
Later, the producer would help Deschanel with her work and remembering her texts. “I got rest between filming and there were more scenes in which I didn’t participate.”
Between 2005 and 2017, Deschanel played the role of Temperance Brennan for twelve seasons, an anthropologist who uses victims’ bones to help the FBI solve murder cases.