Dax Shepard revealed earlier this week that he and late “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Euphoria” star Eric Dane “hated each other” after first meeting in AA, even to the point of threatening violence.
Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the New Orleans Book Festival earlier this week, the “Armchair Expert” host said he eventually became good friends with Dane and explained how they bonded over shared childhood trauma.
“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.”
Dax explained that tensions ran so high that both he and Dane stepped outside the building before “people intervened” and broke up their fight. After their confrontation, the pair continued to attend AA meetings together and, through that, developed a newfound respect for each other.
“Over the course of the next two years, I found myself starting to kind of relate to him,” he said. “I heard his story. 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 continued: “And 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.”
Shepard recalled that after a particularly vulnerable story he shared, “maybe a week or two later,” Dane 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.”
“I came to fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man, and I related, and I ended up loving him so much,” he added.
Shepard also reflected on how much he respected Dane for becoming a public face of ALS, noting that during an appearance on his show in 2022, Dane mentioned that his arm had atrophied. He then noted just how quickly the actor’s physical state declined.
“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,” he said.
Eric Dane, best known for playing Dr. Mark “McSteamy” Sloan on “Grey’s Anatomy,” died Feb. 19 at the age of 53 following a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Dane was widely known for his roles on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Euphoria,” and for his work in film and television over three decades.
You can watch Shepard’s full commentary in the video above.
