A Heavy Scene In Bones Challenged Carla Gallo As An Actor
Everyone has a TV character death that struck a raw nerve — like Tara suddenly getting killed on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Or Cordelia abruptly dying on "Angel." Or Wash's shocking demise in the "Firefly" movie "Serenity." Being sadistic to his fans was kind of Joss Whedon's thing long before his fall from grace, is what I'm getting at.
Lance Sweets (John Francis Daley) being murdered on the orders of the corrupt Dr. Glen Durant (JD Cullum) in the "Bones" season 10 premiere, "The Conspiracy in the Corpse," was another gut-punch of a TV death. Unless you knew what was going on behind the scenes (with Daley's directing career taking off, the show's creatives chose to write Sweets out rather than try and explain his prolonged absence), it must have come as a rather unexpected blow. It wasn't like he got offed in the lead-up to a season finale or at a point where his story appeared to be drawing to a close organically. Quite the opposite; things were going swimmingly for the boyish FBI psychologist, who was not only back in the "will-they" phase of his will-they/won't-they romance with his co-worker turned girlfriend Daisy Wick (Carla Gallo) but was even having a baby with her.
On reflection, perhaps Lance and Daisy's happy news should've immediately ticked "Bones" viewers off that something horrible was about to transpire. After several seasons of romantic complications, the pendulum was practically destined to swing in the opposing direction for them at some point. Regardless, the episode that came right after, "The Lance to the Heart," saw Sweets' peers at the Jeffersonian meet up with Daisy to bid him farewell at his memorial, and the resulting moment was — according to the actor herself — one of the more difficult of Gallo's career.
So long, Sweets
Death was such a common presence on "Bones" that it deserved an office to itself in the Jeffersonian. Most of the time it came in the form of a character whose only purpose was to fuel the plot of that week's episode. Mind you, there had been close calls before (the Jeffersonian's big cheese, Camille "Cam" Saroyan, was originally meant to be killed off after just six episodes), yet nothing that could really soften the blow of Sweets perishing after roughly seven seasons of playing for Team "Bones." It hit the show's cast as hard as the fans, as Gallo recalled to Give Me My Remote in 2014.
"That was a tough one. I would say that's the hardest episode I've ever shot," said Gallo when asked about filming Sweets' send-off. Calling the scene "really super challenging on the work side of it," Gallo admitted that it felt a bit like the cast had lost Daley for real:
"[...] This was a unique circumstance to be mourning someone who is leaving or gone. I've never really had that before. Normally it's, 'I have to play this person died, but I've only been working here a week. I don't know this person, or I was just a day player, or we didn't get to know each other.' But in this case, I think we all felt [this] way: I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe he's left."
For as much as television requires actors to play pretend, some genuine emotion can come through when they're forced to bid adieu to a longtime co-star who's off to work on another project. In other ways, those very real feelings can actually make it harder for them to do their job. No matter the context, it's never easy to say goodbye.