Dax Shepard Says He ‘Hated’ Eric Dane at First

Dax Shepard recently told CNN that he “hated” the late Eric Dane when they first met and said they almost had a “fist fight” after an altercation at an AA meeting.

“Eric Dane, I can now say I met in recovery, and we hated each other. I hated him!” Shepard recalled. “I thought he was a bit of a bully. And we were in a meeting, 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.”

Despite their disagreement, Shepard said they continued to attend the same meeting and eventually started to understand each other better.

“God bless both of us,” Shepard said. “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.”

“His father shot himself in his house when he was a little boy,” Shepard said. “And his mom came upstairs and said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened if you promise that you won’t cry.’ 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.”

He continued, “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.”

Shepard said he later began visiting Dane in his home, where they would talk about their troubled upbringings.

“I came to fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man, and I related,” Shepard said. “I ended up loving him so much.”