Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes says stay tuned to the upcoming Emmy Awards to see the late Eric Dane given his proper due as a popular TV star.
“Well, he’s not a movie star,” Rhimes told Entertainment Tonight on Sunday night backstage at the Academy Awards when asked why the Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria actor was left out of the In Memoriam section.
“I feel like when the Emmys come around, he will be immortalized the way he should be. You can’t fault the Oscars for the fact they’re looking at movies, and there were so many people who are lost. Eric was unique to television and I can’t wait to see what they (Emmys) do with him,” Rhimes added.
Dane died on Feb. 19 at age 53 years old from respiratory failure, and with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, listed as an underlying cause on his death certificate. On the big screen, he portrayed Jamie Madrox/Multiple Man in Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and Dane was a newspaper reporter alongside Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in David Frankel’s Marley & Me (2008).
But he’s best known for TV roles, which includes an eight-year run as the plastic surgeon Mark Sloan on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, as the captain of a U.S. Navy destroyer searching for the cure to a global pandemic on the TNT post-apocalyptic drama The Last Ship, on The WB’s Charmed series and on HBO’s Euphoria as the father of Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs during that show’s first two seasons (2019-22).
Dane also played an ALS patient in an episode of NBC’s medical drama Brilliant Minds, ending the episode with a voiceover as his character records his speech into a voice-making app some patients use when they lose the ability to speak. That was part of an effort by Dane thanks to his career to bring awareness to ALS.
Rhimes added, “Eric is, was an incredible human being. I still say is because it’s very hard for me to believe he’s gone… And he was a huge loss for us. He was a huge loss for the Shondaland family, for the Grey’s Anatomy family and for those who he knew, he was just a wonderful, wonderful giving guy and I don’t know that everybody understands how amazing he was.”
