Sometimes, actors will tap into their own experiences to improve their work, especially if their character is going through something that they’ve experienced themselves. Luckily, David Boreanaz, who played FBI agent Seeley Booth on the Fox procedural “Bones,” has never — to anyone’s knowledge — endured a situation where his real-life child was in danger. Nevertheless, he had to access the emotions he would feel in that situation during a season 2 episode titled “The Man in the Cell.” (Boreanaz was, it should be said, very committed to his character; he even carried three specific items in his pocket during his entire tenure as Booth.)
In “Bones: The Official Companion Book” by Paul Ruditis, Boreanaz recalled a moment during “The Man in the Cell” when Booth’s son Parker (Ty Panitz) is approached by a dangerous serial killer (though he’s left unharmed), and said that he did use his own knowledge as a parent to feel what Booth would feel in the moment. “Being a dad myself and having that kind of connection, I use that in my work a lot,” Boreanaz explained, before addressing the specific episode — where a serial killer named Howard Epps (Heath Freeman) approaches Parker in a public space while he’s hunting down the team at the Jeffersonian Institute. “It was terrifying,” Boreanaz added, admitting that he put himself into a truly frightening mental state for the episode. “But it’s part of the process of getting to the truth of the character and how he would feel under those horrifying circumstances.”
Who was Howard Epps on Bones?
Even though Howard Epps, thankfully, leaves young Parker Booth totally unharmed — he buys the boy an ice cream cone at a playground and walks away, clearly trying to intimidate Booth — he’s one of the scariest serial killers on the show as well as one of the first major antagonists in the narrative. Howard first appears in the season 1 episode “A Man on Death Row” as a prisoner scheduled to be executed who’s a fan of Temperance Brennan’s (Emily Deschanel) books. Booth and Bones are tasked with proving that Epps is actually innocent, but things go sour quickly when Epps tries to break Brennan’s wrist — and she breaks his instead.
From there, Epps develops a serious vendetta against Booth, Brennan, and the rest of the Jeffersonian team. Not only does he send an accomplice named Gil (Rodney Lane Holland), who’s not in prison, to mentally torment Brennan, but he ultimately escapes from prison in “The Man in the Cell” and absolutely terrorizes the entire team (he sends a human heart to Michaela Conlin’s Angela Montenegro, calling her the “heart of the team,” and plants poison in a corpse’s skull, causing Tamara Taylor’s Camille Saroyan to become grievously ill during an autopsy and nearly die). That’s when he approaches Parker, but he doesn’t hurt the child … and when he jumps from a balcony, Booth tries to save him but can’t hold him, and Epps falls to his death.
“Bones,” including this terrifying arc, is available to stream on Hulu now.
