Patrick McElhenney/FOXFreddie Prinze Jr. has committed the ultimate TV sin: "Ive never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Though he's married to Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Prinze, who makes his return to Fox's Bones in tonight's episode, admitted to E! News that he's only seen one episode of the beloved cult hit. "Oh, you can judge. That's fine, I don't care," he said after we shamed him for missing out on Joss Whedon's masterpiece. "It wasn't written for my demographic, so I never saw it."
The single episode he has seen? "Once More With Feeling," the show's iconic musical episode. "Well, they had a tap dancer in it that I thought was really cool. I wanted to watch him dance."
Still, Prinze was down to weigh in on the everlasting Angel (David Boreanaz) vs. Spike (James Marsters) debate, which recently resurfaced in a big way when Gellar revealed she's team "ANGEL," (all-caps!) in a Reddit AMA. "I would have to go Angel, just because he's tougher and he always won," Prinze said with a laugh. "I know he always won, so I'm going with the winner."
It's a good thing he chose Boreanaz's brooding vamp or things might have been a little awkward on the Bones set when Prinze reprised his role as CIA Agent Danny Beck, Booth's (Boreanaz) former army buddy who was introduced in the season nine premiere. This time around, things are decidedly less friendly after one of Danny's CIA sources is killed and Booth is called in to investigate.
"It's definitely night and day compared to the first episode. I mean in the first episode, he was almost recruiting Booth to get the hell out of the FBI and kind of come to the dark side of the force, so to speak," Prinze previewed. "And in this one, you see much more of their relationship as opposed to just how they interact and work together. You see the sort of trust that guys who serve together would have. I've never served myself but I have family and friends who have, and when you're trusting the guy next to you with your life, you may not see him for ten, fifteen, twenty years, the moment you see him, you'd still die for him. It's a tight relationship, so for that to get challenged, which it does in this episode, it has to be pretty major."
"I've never served myself but I have family and friends who have, and when you're trusting the guy next to you with your life, you may not see him for 10, 15, 20 years, the moment you see him, you'd still die for him," Prinze continued. "It's a tight relationship, so for that to get challenged, which it does in this episode, it has to be pretty major."
And their history will have a major impact on Booth as he's caught between doing the right thing and his loyalty to Danny, who is "not forthcoming and hiding "a lot" of secrets. (Prinze does tease we will see a "more human, more vulnerable side" to Danny in the hour.)
"I mean there's a point in the episode where he could legitimately arrest me, and he has to make a decision as to whether he's going to or not, and I think nine times out of ten, he's arresting the guy, and I think the only thing that's keeping him from doing that in this episode is our history together."
So how did the guest appearance come to fruitition? On vacation, when he happened to bump into Boreanaz, an on-going occurrence for Prinze, who joked, "We're vacation stalkers."
"I was eating with my kids, I had just put them down for bed. I was coming back to find Sarah by the pool, and she said ‘Hey, look who I found again,' because no matter where we go on vacation, David's always there. Literally," Prinze explained. "It doesn't matter where – we could go to Siberia, and he'd be like, ‘Yeah, I like hockey, and I heard they had good hockey in Siberia.' So we ran into each other, and Sarah said ‘David has something he wants to talk to you about," and he brought up this character. We just sort of started spit-balling who this guy was and how they interacted, and what their relationship was like."
And though he's recently guested of Bones and Witches of East End, don't expect to see Prinze make a full-time return to TV anytime soon. "I can't put in 15 hour days. I would never see my kids again," he said. "I'm a full-time dad, I'm a part-time actor. I just can't do it."
Bones airs tonight at 8 p.m. on Fox.