Dax Shepard and Eric Dane Stewart Cook/CBS/Getty Images; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Dax Shepard is opening up about how he formed an unexpected friendship with the late Eric Dane.
During a recent chat with CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the New Orleans Book Festival, Shepard explained that he initially “hated” Dane and nearly engaged in a fight with him. But after learning about his upbringing through AA meetings, the two eventually connected and became friends.
“Eric Dane, I can now say I met in recovery and we hated each other. I hated him!” Shepard said. “I thought he was a bit of a bully. And we were in a meeting [and] he threatened a younger member of the group, and this had been simmering for a long time, and I said, ‘Let’s go. Outside. Right now.’ It was on. And we walked outside to a fist fight in the driveway of an AA meeting.”
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The crowd laughed, and the Parenthood actor noted that people intervened and broke up the fight. “God bless both of us. We kept coming back to the same meeting. Over the course of the next two years, I found myself starting to kind of relate to him. I heard his story.”
As Shepard got to know him better, he said he began to understand the pain behind Dane’s behavior.
“His father shot himself in his house when he was a little boy. And his mom came upstairs and said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened if you promise that you won’t cry,'” Shepard said. “So that little boy held onto that. And then that little boy grew up without a dad, like I grew up without a dad, and he was so in search of masculine validation, and it took all these shapes that I hated. That I’m sure he hated in me.”
“I remember he had his share one time and I said, ‘I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but that’s one of my favorite shares I’ve ever heard,’” the 51-year-old recalled. “Maybe a week or two later, one of his shares, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I think I’ve come to fall in love with Dax.’ And then we became friends.”
Later, Shepard said that he would often visit Dane’s home, where they bonded over not having a dad around and the meaning of being a man. “I came to fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man, and I related,” he said. “I ended up loving him so much.”
Dane, known for his memorable roles as McSteamy in Grey’s Anatomy and Cal Jacobs, Nate Jacobs’ (Jacob Elordi) dad in Euphoria, revealed he was diagnosed with ALS in April of last year after first experiencing symptoms a year and a half earlier. He died in February at the age of 53.
Shepard said, “For a person who was so hellbent on being hyper-masculine and incredibly fit, to have agreed to become the face of this disease, completely diminished, I found to be the bravest thing he’d done in all these pursuits of manliness.”
Both men have been open about their struggles with addiction. Dane also revealed he was “let go” from Grey’s Anatomy because he “wasn’t the same guy” they hired during his battle with addiction, during a June 24, 2024, appearance on Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
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