‘Bones’ Star Nearly Lost Her Job During Season 1: ‘I Get Emotional Just Thinking About It’

Bones would have looked a lot different without Emily Deschanel. The actress revealed recently that she almost lost her role on the hit series due to anxiety.

She portrayed Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan in the series. She admitted she was often late to set and forgetting lines during filming because of her condition.

“We were working insane hours, longer than just a normal series,” she explained during the July 8 episode of the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast. “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.”

Furthermore, she revealed that she dealt with ADHD and dyslexia, which worsened things for her on set and while preparing for scenes. Things were so bad that she would often arrive at work on “no sleep” and tried her best to “remember the lines that I had memorized the night before and then I had them in my head and couldn’t remember them,” to no avail.

After being late once due to LA traffic, she was confronted by the Fox series’ creator, Hart Hanson. She said the meeting was “unusual” and he shared the studios’ “concerns” that turned into a pivotal moment in her role on the show.

“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],” she noted. “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.”

Luckily, she was able to turn things around. She starred in the series all 12 seasons from 2005 to 2017.