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.