The One Body On Bones That Had Eric Millegan Extra Grossed Out
"Bones" is a show that had its fair share of dead bodies to contend with during its 12-season run. It makes sense, given that it's a show about people trying to solve deadly crimes. But one of the show's most hard-to-contend-with bodies came early on during its first season, so much so that Eric Millegan, who played Zack Addy, had a difficult time even being around it. It was, as he put it, "really gross."
The body in question showed up in the episode "A Man on Death Row," which was the seventh episode of the show overall. It centers on Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Booth (David Boreanaz) investigating the case of a man on death row who some claim is innocent. They dig up new evidence, including two additional murders. This forces them to question the legitimacy of the forthcoming execution. Part of digging through the case involved digging up a years-old body. In the "Bones" season 1 DVD extra "Squints," Millegan explained that this particular cadaver nearly made him throw up:
"There was a time in one of the episodes where we exhumed a girl who had been raped and murdered. So we had to like, exhume a seven-year-old dead body. She wasn't seven, but she had been dead for seven years. That body was gross. When I saw that, I was gonna throw up. I had to pull myself together for that because that was really gross."
There were other gross things the cast had to contend with over the years, with Deschanel finding things other than the bodies especially gruesome. Still, with the show's special effects artists doing their job well, it's easy to imagine a seven-year-old corpse being quite nasty.
'I couldn't look at that'
"A Man on Death Row" is an interesting episode as it was actually written by Noah Hawley, who has since become a big name in TV. Not only is he behind FX shows such as "Fargo" and "Legion," but he's also behind the upcoming "Alien" TV series. What's more, it was written as the show's fourth episode yet ended up airing as the seventh.
When it comes to the show's various dead bodies — fake though they may have been — it wasn't just Millegan who found them unsettling. As Boreanaz explained in the same featurette, he had a rough go of it on a specific episode because he, at the time, had a young kid of his own. The body in question made him think about this:
"When we did the episode about the little kid it was pretty hard for me because I have a three-year-old. That was rough. I couldn't look at that. There are some things that really take you back. The horrific, slimy stuff that might be going down."
The show also went to great lengths to try and ensure that everyone in the crime lab was doing things by the book, relatively speaking. As T.J. Thyne, the actor behind Jack Hodgins, explained in the same featurette, there were experts on set whose job it was to make sure the cast was handling the corpses correctly:
"We really do have someone here at all times to help us through, and make sure we're doing everything correct. We have someone that's there every time we're dealing with a body to make sure that we would do it correctly. That's been a great learning experience for all of us knowing, I can't even put this on the table because it could technically affect the results of our findings."
"Bones" is currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video