David Boreanaz is sort of a throwback to a different era: an actor who is completely comfortable being a TV star and nothing more. He showed little interest in becoming a movie star, and while he’s a producer and director, he usually only undertakes those roles on his own TV shows. I think there are three kinds of people: people who love David because of Buffy; people who love David because of Bones; and people who just don’t like him. I’m a Bones person – that show was great and David was great on it, as was Emily Deschanel. Bones ran for 12 seasons and probably made David and Emily a lot of money (especially in residuals). After Bones ended, David immediately jumped into SEAL Team, which was on CBS and now on Paramount+. The seventh season has just premiered, and it turns out that this will be the final season. David decided to quit because he simply can’t keep up with all of the bonkers stunt work. He gave an interview to People Mag about the end of the show, Bones and more. Some highlights:

Why he can’t do SEAL Team anymore: “My body just can’t do it anymore!” He recalls directing a scene where he had to carry a 250-lb. stunt double on his back. “Ten feet in, I hit a rock, and my ankle twists, and I fall flat down. My ankle is ballooning, but I had to keep going. You learn from the SEALs how to push through pain — I’m talking guys who have had their arm blown off and are cracking jokes because that’s how they deal with it. It’s very intense. I take good care of myself, but it gets to a point where your body’s not moving like it used to… I think I’ve had four MRIs in the past four months, for my knees, hips, shoulders. It’s been quite a journey.”

He’s keeping busy but he’s also ready for a break: “I have plans. My work ethic is always head on a swivel, be in the now, don’t look back, don’t look far down the pipeline.” He does note that while he’s ready for a break after starring in back-to-back series for nearly 30 years (he was also on Bones, opposite Emily Deschanel from 2005-2017), he’s not good at sitting still. “Vacations are good until, like, the second day, and then I’m bouncing my knees thinking about what we’re going to do next,” he says with a laugh. But he looks forward to hanging out with his kids, Jaden, 22, and Bella, 15. “My mind is always actively going. Work to me is relaxation, it fulfills me.” Work, he says, and spending time with his kids. “That’s it.”

He loves that people are still watching ‘Bones’: “I was doing LIVE with Kelly and Mark the other day [for the final season of SEAL Team], and these two younger girls were there for a fashion show, literally like 10 years old and 12. Their mom was there, and she said they were just so excited I was there because they love Bones, and I’m just sitting there going, ‘This is so trippy!'”

He had a lot of fun on ‘Bones’: “Emily Deschanel and I were like, ‘How do we change the spectrum of half-hour procedural?'” he says of working closely with his costar, noting that they even studied together with his acting coach on weekends. “You have to have it be character-driven. You have to be talking over dead forensic bodies, cracking jokes. You have to be in tune with each other. And we created something special. I was lucky to be a part of it. It went back to the consistency, to the dedication to taking weekends off, studying with Ivana [Chubbuck], and having Emily say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that with you.’ That’s a gift, that’s an inspiration. You don’t usually get that with other actors. But that’s how we created chemistry. It wasn’t just like, ‘Here are the lines, say them. We rewrote a lot of those scenes, we presented them, we played with them inside and out, we added our subtext.”

[From People Magazine]

Emily and David always said that about Bones, that they worked together really well and they spent a lot of time working on that chemistry and working with an acting coach. Every story I hear about that show, it’s always like: David and Emily were always on the same page, they always had each other’s back, they had a really strong professional bond. That’s why the show ran for twelve years too, even though they were really running out of stories towards the end. It’s crazy that David has basically been on back-to-back TV shows for almost 30 years, and it sounds like this SEAL Team show almost killed him. He’s too old to be doing that stuff! After the fourth MRI, he was like… some Navy SEALs sit at a desk, right? Surely one of the SEALs’ jobs is paperwork?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.