If most fans had their way, Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth, the lead characters on Fox’s quirky crime drama Bones, would be romantically involved right now. No more teasing, no more tricks, no more stalling.
At least that’s the way Emily Deschanel, the show’s leading lady, reads her admittedly random samplings of viewer feedback.
"People always want to know when they’re going to get together," Deschanel says. "If somebody stops me in the street or something, it’s always a question."
Deschanel, who plays Brennan, a.k.a. "Bones," a brilliant forensic anthropologist/crime novelist/FBI consultant, urges patience. But frankly, she’s also eager for the big hookup with her FBI partner (played by David Boreanaz).
"It’s something that everyone has been waiting for, for a long time," she says. "The concern is that it will dissipate the romantic tension between the characters. A lot of shows have died from that."
Season 3 tantalized viewers with a Brennan-Booth kiss. Season 4 had Brennan feeling twinges of baby fever and asking Booth to father her child. The season ended with the couple in bed and in love, but it was a fake-out: Booth was hallucinating while in a coma.
Now in Season 5, airing at 7 p.m. Thursdays, they’re still fencing with their feelings.
Deschanel believes that the characters eventually will deal with those emotions in a satisfying way. But when? "I’m thinking [Season] 10," she teases.
More from Deschanel about the show, her character and all those dead bodies:
If we sent you to a college or to a crime scene, how long do you think you could fool everybody before being found out as a fraud?
Maybe 10 to 15 minutes. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve learned from the show, but there are certain details I can’t pull off. I know you can estimate the height of someone based on the length of the femur, but I don’t know the formula. I read it in a book, but I certainly don’t carry it around in my mind. Brennan is so good at what she does that, after seeing thousands of dead bodies in her life, she can just look at a skeleton and know what that person looked like and how tall they were and what ethnicity and which sex they were. I just know where to look and pretend.
Have you ever, for the sake of research, visited a real morgue?
I’ve never seen a dead body in my life, and I chose not to. I knew that it would affect me. I believe in using your imagination as an actor. That’s the greatest tool we have. My character is supposed to be very at ease with dead bodies. So I didn’t want to risk changing that and feel all of a sudden uneasy. I still have not been to a morgue.
How disturbing are the fake dead bodies on the set?
You kind of get used to them. But I did have family friends who visited the set. Their girl was 5 and their boy was 10 or 11. I was trying to shield her from the bodies, which is a little difficult on our set. It wasn’t a dead-body day, but there are always miscellaneous body parts lying around and we have bodies covered with sheets in the autopsy room. When I gave them the tour, I pulled the sheets open to show her that they were dummies. Well, they left and then I heard from the mom, who wasn’t on the tour. She told me her daughter, whose name is Emily, had said, 'I saw real dead bodies and it was so cool.’ She swore she saw real dead bodies, but I promise there were none.
Do you think Brennan will continue to be so socially awkward, regardless how long the show runs?
If you look from the beginning of season one to now, she has warmed up a lot. I know that sounds crazy, because she still has a long way to go. But she has definitely changed and I think she’s opened up with her emotions. I’ve talked to some psychologists who work with people with Asperger syndrome and basically Brennan has some form of Asperger’s: She’s a genius but has a hard time interacting in social situations. But Brennan is really trying to learn how to relate to people and to open up her emotions and become more sympathetic and all of that.
Source: Star-Telegram
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