Dax Shepard said he once hated Eric Dane, called him a bully and challenged him to a fist fight outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting after Dane threatened a younger member of the group. The confrontation, Shepard said in a recent conversation with Anderson Cooper at the New Orleans Book Festival, ended with other people stepping in and breaking them apart in a driveway.
Shepard said the two men kept returning to the same meeting for the next two years, and that the hostility slowly gave way to a bond. He said Dane opened up about a childhood defined by trauma, including the death of his father, who shot himself in the house when Dane was a little boy. Dane’s mother, Shepard recalled, told him, “I’ll tell you what happened if you promise that you won’t cry.”
That story, Shepard said, changed the way he saw Dane. He said he came to understand that Dane had grown up without a father and was searching for masculine validation, and that the actor later told him, “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but that’s one of my favorite shares I’ve ever heard.” Shepard said Dane eventually told him, “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I think I’ve come to fall in love with Dax,” and that he often visited Dane’s home after they became friends.
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The friendship carried into the final chapter of Dane’s life. Known for playing McSteamy on Grey’s Anatomy and Cal Jacobs on Euphoria, Dane revealed in April of last year that he had been diagnosed with ALS after first noticing symptoms a year and a half earlier. Shepard said Dane agreed to become the face of ALS even as the disease diminished him, calling that choice “the bravest thing he’d done in all these pursuits of manliness.” Dane died in February at age 53.
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The exchange also fit a pattern both men had discussed publicly for years: recovery, addiction and the damage that can sit underneath a confident exterior. On June 24, 2024, Dane said on Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that he was let go from Grey’s Anatomy because he was not the same guy they hired during his battle with addiction. Shepard said that over time he came to “fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man,” and in the end, he said, “I ended up loving him so much.”
