How David Boreanaz & Emily Deschanel Really Felt About Working Together On Bones

When you’re hired to do a job, carrying out your duties in a professional, effective manner does not mean you have to like all of the people you work with. Obviously, you need to treat all of your coworkers with a modicum of respect (unless they’re creeps or utter incompetents), but you’re also allowed to be completely annoyed by the people you see five or more days a week.

This gets tricky, however, when your job requires you to fake like you not only dig your coworker, but, in some cases, are head-over-heels in love with them. Actors are already unique creatures who use their imaginations to make a living; when they develop an outsized ego or are just plain weird, pretending that they’re the apple of your eye can be positively brutal. So kudos to Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic, who evidently couldn’t stand each other but seem like boon companions whenever I catch the last five minutes of a “Castle” episode prior to the start of TNT’s “Inside the NBA.” Or what about Lea Michele and Naya Rivera on “Glee,” who evidently weren’t on speaking terms during the last season of “Glee?” And then there’s Alyssa Milano and Shannon Doherty, who feuded for years after the latter departed their hit series “Charmed.” Whatever was going on off-camera on these shows, it never showed up on-camera.

With this in mind, you probably don’t want to know about the behind-the-scenes relationships between the actors on your favorite television series. If you’re a “Bones” fan, you’re no doubt wondering if Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz 100% faked that sparkling chemistry for 12 seasons. Did the human beings who gave us Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth actually hate each other’s guts? Well…

The awful truth is that, if you’re a fan of celebrity scrappin’, there’s nothing to see here. Deschanel and Boreanaz had a terrific working relationship. Boreanaz was cast first and had already starred in his own long-running series (“Angel”), so he could’ve easily pulled rank on the less experienced Deschanel. But no. As Deschanel told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019, “He was very respectful of me. He respected me from the very beginning, and I will always appreciate that. We had a great relationship.”

Surely, she’s lying, right? Not according to Boreanaz, who, in an interview with TV Insider, said he was “so proud” of his “partner.”

What was their secret to getting along for over a decade, during which they spent more time with each other than their own families? According to Deschanel:

“He never tried to tell me what to do, never tried to school me in any way or make me feel like I didn’t belong or like I was learning and new. We went to an acting coach, so we basically had therapy every week together, which is kind of hilarious, in certain ways, ’cause we would talk about our lives as well in the sessions.”

There was also one more trick to making their work relationship a total like-fest.

In the interview with THR, Deschanel said they got along by anticipating that sometimes they wouldn’t get along.

“We gave each other permission to walk away at different times, or just say ‘you’re really bothering me right now,” or “you’re annoying me, I have to get away from you.’ And we rarely used that because we gave each other permission and we talked about it.”

This rosiness could’ve potentially withered when they directed each other in separate episodes during the final season, but that went swimmingly, too. As Boreanaz told TV Insider:

“To have Emily — and I’ve been telling her to get in the whole run of the series to get in and direct an episode; I encouraged her to do that. The fact that she started us off was such a fantastic thing. I’m so proud of her. For her to be able to get that under her belt. And it was remarkable to be on the other end receiving her commands.”

“I’m always trying to boss him around,” joked Deschenal, “But I had the official OK to do it this time.”

So there you have it. Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz were boringly wonderful to each other during the entirety of the long “Bones” run. How dare they literally act like professionals!