Who Did The Boys Star Play?

The closer one looks at “Bones,” the more one begins to wonder if everything really does come back to Hart Hanson’s long-lived rom-com/gnarly crime procedural. From multiple “Breaking Bad” actors showing up as guest stars to Kevin Yagher, the legendary creature designer who co-wrote Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow,” playing a key creative role behind-the-scenes on the series with his brother Chris Yagher, it seems as though our plane of existence is merely a tangled web with “Bones” at the center. Were the show to somehow be lost to the ravages of time like so much older media has been, it’s possible our reality as we know it would collapse. Clearly, we should stop playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and start playing Six Degrees of Bones instead.

You think I’m kidding? Try this on for size: Before he came to fame playing Adonis Creed and Killmonger, Michael B. Jordan was but a humble one-off player on “Bones.” Heck, Noah Hawley (creator of the TV shows “Fargo” and “Legion”) might not even have a career today if he hadn’t secured a cushy multi-year gig as a writer-producer on the show when he was just starting out (during which he even wrote the “Bones” episode with the most viewers when it first aired). And let’s not forget that time Sydney Sweeney made her screen debut as the young daughter of the victim in the season 1 “Bones” episode “The Man in the Wall.”

Yes, I made that last factoid up, but admit it: You were just about to Google it and see if I was telling the truth, weren’t you?

That being said, “The Man in the Wall” is an actual episode of “Bones” (one that aired in 2005) and it does, in fact, feature a familiar face on its guest star roster: “The Boys” actor Laz Alonso.

The episode titles on “Bones” tend to be more practical than creative, and “The Man in the Wall” is no exception. Serving as the sixth episode of the first season, this outing follows Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) as our favorite socially-aloof forensics expert accompanies her free-spirited pal/co-worker Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin) out for a wild night at a club. As you’d expect, things quickly take a turn for the awkward (Bones causes a ruckus by referring to the music being played as “tribal,” which, yeesh Bones, micro-aggression much?) even before a wall gets broken amidst all the mishegoss, revealing — that’s right — a dead man hidden behind it.

At the time “The Man in the Wall” aired on Fox, Alonso had only been acting professionally for five years and had yet to really break out. Moreover, save for his single-season recurring roles on the network medical drama “Providence” and the sitcom “One on One,” his most significant project at that juncture might’ve been 2003’s “Leprechaun 6: Back 2 Tha Hood.” (No shame in that; he’s not the first actor to use the “Leprechaun” franchise as a springboard to bigger things.) That being the case, it’ll probably come as little surprise to learn that Alonso didn’t have a whole lot to do on “Bones” as George Warren, the brother of a woman named Eve who ends up being a key part of the mystery surrounding the eponymous corpse-in-a-wall and the hunt to find their killer.

After that, Alonzo continued to make a name for himself with roles in films like “Jarhead,” “Fast & Furious,” and “Avatar” on his way to landing multiple recurring parts on TV, culminating with his role on “The Boys” in 2019. As Marvin T. “Mother’s” Milk, the leader of the titular anti-superhero squad, Alonzo has gone above and beyond proving his mettle as a performer, even altering his appearance for “The Boys” season 4 to reflect the decidedly bad time his character was having during that batch of episodes. (To be fair, nobody’s living their best life that season.) It just goes to show: behind every successful artist in the industry, there’s “Bones.”

“Bones” is currently available to stream on Hulu.