Bones' Emily Deschanel
by Steve Eramo
12/15/2010
Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz
IN the Bones episode The Doctor in the Photo(which aired last week on Fox), Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) gets a glimpse into her own life when the body of a brilliant and career-driven surgeon is found in a rough neighborhood with multiple fractures in her skull and no indication as to how or why she was there. While the team investigates the case objectively, Brennan struggles to separate her own life from the victim’s as she perceives many parallels between them the more she learns about the victim’s past. Meanwhile, evidence found at the crime scene brings the team closer to solving the case, but it’s Brennan’s unique perspective that propels her to retrace the final events of the victim’s life. With the reassurance of a new friend and Jeffersonian security guard, Micah Leggat (guest star Enrico Colantoni), Brennan makes a discovery about herself and learns a lesson about taking chances.
A few days prior to the airing of this episode, Bones leading lady Emily Deschanel spoke with myself as well as other journalists about this episode and the series in general. Rather than removing a number of spoiler-related paragraphs from our conversation, I decided to wait until after the episode aired to run this piece. I hope you enjoy the following edited version of the Q & A we did with Emily.
... In this episode, you do a fantastic scene with David Boreanaz (Special Agent Seeley Booth) in the car when you’re talking to him. It’s a really somber moment. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like filming that emotionally charged scene? It actually had me crying, too.
ED - I shouldn’t say, “That’s nice. I’m glad you cried,” but I guess we always want to affect people emotionally. It was one of those scenes that you know is coming up and you prepare for it acting-wise. It’s also one of those scenes that [in the script] says you’re supposed to cry and you’re like, “It’s okay, though, if I don’t cry. I don’t have to cry,” but then everyone is expecting you to cry. So there’s a lot of pressure in that way.
As an actor you kind of dread those types of scenes in a way, because you’d rather it [the crying] not be written in and, instead, just see whether or not your emotions go to that place. At the same time, it’s good to have those markers as an actor in order to know where your breaking points are for the character, and where in the story is the low point. Basically in this scene, Brennan has to face her own life because this woman has died and she didn’t have much of a personal life. The only people who listed her as missing are the people she worked with. She didn’t have any friends. She had some kind of romance with a guy, but nothing ever came of that. No one really missed her. Isn’t that almost every human’s worst fears, dying and no one misses you or notices. So this affects Brennan greatly. She starts relating to the character, believing that it’s her. She starts seeing her own life and seeing that she made a mistake when she said no to Booth last year. She goes out on a limb and says to Booth, “I’m here.”
This whole experience forces Brennan into a place where she is bold and kind of aware of her feelings in a way that she hasn’t been before, which is very strange for her. [Executive producer] Hart Hansen, the creator of the show, and I have always talked about how Brennan may have these feelings for Booth, but in a way she’s the last person to realize that. It takes a very odd experience for her to face her feelings and to see them.
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