This story contains discussion of substance abuse and suicide.
As the world continues to remember late actor Eric Dane, who passed away earlier this year after living with ALS, Dax Shepard has shared a complicated and heartbreaking story about his prior history with the actor.
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During a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Dax revealed that he knew Eric through their experience in recovery for substance abuse issues — and that their initial relationship was far from positive at the beginning.
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“Eric Dane, I can now say I met in recovery and we hated each other. I hated him!” Dax said. “I thought he was a bit of a bully."
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Dax explained that, while in a recovery meeting, Eric allegedly "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.”
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Thankfully, Dax said that "people intervened" before the two could truly come to blows — and out of that initial confrontation, his and Eric's relationship took a much different turn. “Over the course of the next two years, I found myself starting to kind of relate to him,” Dax said.
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“I heard his story," Dax recalled. "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.’ 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.”
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“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.’ 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.”
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Dax said that he and Eric subsequently bonded over “the vacuum left when you don’t have a dad around” as well as issues of masculinity the two men dealt with. “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 recalled.
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“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."
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.