John Francis Daley may not be a household name per se, but he and his writing/directing partner Jonathan Goldstein have cultivated a small fandom who get excited by just seeing their credits in a trailer or poster. They co-wrote “Horrible Bosses” and the fantastic “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” directed one of the best comedies of the past decade in “Game Night,” and recently helmed the fantastically underrated fantasy adventure “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.” As an actor, he’s also been a part of two beloved and hugely popular TV shows, as Sam on “Freaks and Geeks” and in his role as the nerdy and youthful criminal profiler Dr. Lance Sweets on “Bones.”
Sweets was a key member of the “Bones” family for 138 of the 246 episodes of the series, even as Daley kickstarted his screenwriting career. Once Daley and Goldstein also made the jump to directing with the 2015 remake of “Vacation,” it became clear that his behind-the-camera career would clash with his on-camera commitments, and it was time to send Sweets off into the sunset.
Rather than a climactic end-of-season death, Daley’s Sweets was quite brutally killed off in the show’s season 10 premiere, beaten to death by a Navy Seal in a parking garage after getting too close to a conspiracy. Speaking with TVLine in 2014, executive producer Stephen Nathan talked about the decision to kill off the character.
“It was a complicated and very difficult decision for us,” he said, naming the timing of the start of filming of “Vacation” coinciding with the start of the season as the impetus for the decision. “We realized that this fit in very well with the conspiracy arc [that landed Booth in jail]. It gives us something very rich and very emotional to play within the first half of the season. Everybody’s affected very deeply by this. And it also seemed to be a surprising way to start the season.”
No one wanted Sweets gone from Bones
Making matters worse, the final day of filming for John Francis Daley was a rather lonely and brutal experience — matching the lonely and brutal send-off the character got. His final scene was scheduled to be shot at midnight, with the main crew already home for the day and the cast at Comic-Con with the producers.
Still, the death of Sweets is one of the biggest and most brutal ones in the show, and it hit the other cast members rather hard. David Boreanaz has admitted that it affected him particularly heavily, while Carla Gallo — who played Sweets’ on-again, off-again girlfriend who was pregnant with his unborn child at the time — said that she wanted the characters to get back together before discovering Sweets was going to get killed off. Even Daley himself was hoping not to get killed off but instead segue back into “Bones” after shooting the “Vacation” remake. Sadly, his request was denied.
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