Emily Deschanel Recalls Having Panic Attacks During Season 1 Of ‘Bones' & Feeling 'Shame' After Being Reprimanded For Being 'Unprepared'
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.
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'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.
Loosely based on the life and novels of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, a producer on the show, each episode of Bones unpacks an FBI case file surrounding the mystery of human remains, as well as the personal lives of its central characters. The show garnered two Emmy nods throughout its run.
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