{"id":328058,"date":"2025-12-03T13:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T13:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/328058\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T13:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T13:33:11","slug":"eric-dane-opens-up-about-emotional-battle-of-living-with-als","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/328058\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Dane opens up about emotional battle of living with ALS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actor Eric Dane<\/a> has been brutally honest about the reality that he’s facing after having been diagnosed with ALS, since he revealed it in April<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

He isn’t stopping now.\n<\/p>\n

“I have no reason to be in a good spirit at any time, on any given day,” the Grey’s Anatomy alum and ambassador for the nonprofit advocacy organization I AM ALS<\/a> said during a virtual conversation held on Giving Tuesday. “I don’t think anybody would blame me if I went upstairs in my bedroom, crawled under the sheets, and spent the next two weeks crying.”\n<\/p>\n

Dane, 53, said in June that he had only “one functioning arm<\/a>,” due to his struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Johns Hopkins Medicine<\/a> describes it as a “fatal type of motor neuron disease” that causes “progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain.” Eventually, symptoms can include paralysis and trouble breathing and swallowing.\n<\/p>\n

Eric Dane married Rebecca Gayheart in 2004.<\/p>\n

Jason LaVeris\/FilmMagic<\/p>\n

But Dane makes sure to put in the effort.\n<\/p>\n

“I think it’s imperative that I share my journey with as many people as I can because I don’t feel like my life is about me anymore,” continued Dane, who has a “super complicated<\/a>” relationship with actress Rebecca Gayheart, whom he married in 2004. “And it’s something I’ve had to wrestle with because I’m a pretty selfish person, and I’d love for my life to be all about me, but I just can’t \u2014 I don’t think I’d be able to move forward if that were the case.”\n<\/p>\n

Dane noted that it was “such a big deal” to him to ensure that people are informed about ALS and “what we can do to combat it and improve the landscape.”\n<\/p>\n

“Because,” he continued, “it’s so rocky and littered with hurdles and bureaucracy and all this other nonsense that we’re trying to sift through so we can get to a place where we can start working on solutions.”\n<\/p>\n

One of Dane’s fellow panelists was Michael Grassi, the showrunner, creator, and executive producer of NBC’s Brilliant Minds. Dane appeared on the medical drama<\/a>, playing a character with ALS, on the series’ Nov. 24 episode.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

“Eric, I feel like from the very beginning, the lines of communication had to be very open as we sort of entered this process together,” Grassi said. “And I think it was just very important for us to meet Eric where he was, and Eric showed up every single day, and he blew us away, and he was incredible.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Grassi noted, too, that two of the show’s writers have had family members who struggled with ALS, so they were especially thoughtful about writing the story of a firefighter with ALS figuring out how to share his diagnosis with his family.\n<\/p>\n

It was important to all of them that they didn’t sensationalize the disease.\n<\/p>\n

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Ahead of the episode, Grassi told USA Today<\/a> that Dane’s portrayal had been well received when it was filmed.\n<\/p>\n

“I have never seen this happen in my entire career, but he essentially got a 10-minute standing ovation after shooting that scene,” Grassi said.\u00a0“Because it was so beautiful and so honest and so real.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Actor Eric Dane has been brutally honest about the reality that he’s facing after having been diagnosed with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-328058","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}