Dax Shepard initially hated Eric Dane when they met at an AA meeting but they eventually became friends.
Dax Shepard “hated” Eric Dane when they first met and they once had a “fist fight” outside an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.
The 51-year-old podcaster first met the late Euphoria actor – who died in February aged 53 after battling ALS – in recovery and his first impressions of the star was that he was a “bully”, with their mutual dislike eventually leading to a physical altercation.
Speaking to Anderson Cooper at the New Orleans Book Festival, People magazine reports Dax said: “Eric Dane, I can now say I met in recovery, and we hated each other. I hated him. I thought he was a bit of a bully.”
Of one meeting they both attended, Dax claimed Eric “threatened a younger member of the group.”
He added: “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.”
Other attendees intervened to break up the fight and despite the altercation, the pair “kept coming back to the same meeting.”
As time passed, the Armchair Expert host admitted he began to warm to Eric and could see similarities between them.
He said: “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. 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.”
Dax and Eric eventually offered support to one another at their AA meetings.
The CHiPS star said: “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 favourite 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.”
And while their friendship initially began at recovery meetings, the pair often visited one another and bonded over their shared trauma from not having a father figure.
Dax said: “I came to fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man, and I related. I ended up loving him so much.”
Dax praised his friend for speaking out after being diagnosed with the degenerative condition ALS.
He said: “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.”
Dax Shepard hated Eric Dane at first
