Eric Dane lists staggering amount of drugs he tried during ‘dark period’ in posthumous memoir
Eric Dane listed the drugs he took in his 20s in his posthumous memoir, My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments, which is due out Nov. 3.
The Grey’s Anatomy star, who died in February at the age of 53, said he tried almost everything available during what he called his ‘dark period’.
In an exclusive excerpt published by People, Dane wrote: “I call that my dark period. I auditioned for a few roles, got cast in some, but mainly I did drugs. I got high, I got stoned, I got wasted, I shot up, I freebased, I did every drug imaginable.”
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He then offered what he described as a ‘partial list’: “Booze, pot, acid. Heroin. Cocaine. Mushrooms. Mescaline. Crystal meth. Crack. Painkillers. Fistfuls of painkillers. Buckets of painkillers. Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin, you name it, everything on the market. All the benzos. Xanax. Valium. All the muscle relaxers. All the uppers. Adderall. Ritalin.”
He concluded: “I don’t think there’s a drug I didn’t try.”
Dane had almost given up on acting before he booked Grey’s Anatomy in 2005, according to the excerpt. Around 2008, at the height of his fame, he relapsed on painkillers after herniating a cervical disc in his neck while working out.
His weight dropped to 170, he wrote, and he became quiet on set. He said he tried not to arrive high, but couldn’t always help it.
Show creator Shonda Rhimes pulled him aside several times to say she would ‘take care’ of him if he needed a break, and he went to rehab during hiatus. He went five times over the course of the show.
Toward the end of season 8 in 2012, Rhimes told Dane he would not be returning for the next season. He wrote that the reason was not his addiction, although he said it ‘didn’t help’.
“Despite Mark Sloan’s popularity, I have become too expensive. I have become expendable,” he wrote.
His next major role was in TNT’s The Last Ship. While filming in 2017, he checked into a treatment center for depression, which shut down production for six weeks. A year later, his marriage collapsed.
Rebecca Gayheart filed for divorce in 2018 after 14 years of marriage, but the pair stayed close and never signed the papers.
Dane wrote that he first noticed something was wrong on Jan. 7, 2024, when he suddenly couldn’t work chopsticks with his right hand while eating sushi with his kids. After nine months of searching for answers,
Dr. Mark Terrelonge of the University of California, San Francisco, diagnosed him with ALS.
He called Gayheart afterward and told her: 'It’s what we feared.'
On a later vacation in Mexico, Dane wrote, his youngest daughter, Georgia, and her friend pulled him from the water after he realized he couldn’t swim. “I can’t swim, Rebecca,” he told Gayheart afterward.
He addressed his daughters directly: “Never give up. No matter what happens to you, fight until your last breath.”
Dane is survived by Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14, whom he shared with Gayheart.
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, US News
Thomas Bamford