Eric Dane was ‘let go’ from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ during addiction battle

It wasn’t easy for Eric Dane to check out of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. 

The Grey’s Anatomy alum, who starred as fan favorite Mark “McSteamy” Sloan for six seasons, has revealed that it wasn’t his decision to part ways with the medical drama in 2012. 

“I didn’t leave so much as I think I was let go,” he admitted on a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, saying he was “struggling” with drug and alcohol addiction at the time. “They didn’t let me go because of that,” he added, “although it definitely didn’t help.”

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Dane then clarified that he was “probably fired” from the show due to financial reasons. “I was starting to become, as most of these actors who have spent significant time on a show, you start to become very expensive for the network,” he said. “And the network knows that the show is going to do what it’s going to do irrespective of who they keep on it. As long as they have their Grey, they’re fine. I wasn’t the same guy they had hired, so I had understood when I was let go.”

A representative for ABC did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly’s request for comment. 

Still, Dane had only positive things to say about Grey’s creator, Shonda Rhimes. “She protected us fiercely,” he recalled. “She protected us publicly, she protected us privately. I love Shonda Rhimes, and she protected me, but I was probably fired. It wasn’t ceremoniously like, ‘You’re fired.’ It was just like, ‘You’re not coming back.'”

The actor, who has been open about his journey to sobriety over the years, told Shepard that he’d been sober for “three or four years” before joining Grey’s Anatomy but that he relapsed during the 2007 writers’ strike. “If you take the whole eight years I was on Grey’s Anatomy, I was f—ed up longer than I was sober,” he said, “and that was when things started going sideways for me.”

He eventually exited the series in 2012, when his character Mark died in a plane crash at the beginning of season 9. At the time, Dane told EW that he was leaving the series in order to pursue “something different.”

“Grey’s Anatomy is a world — it’s not about any one individual actor and the storylines were sort of… you know, heading in different directions,” he said. “So it was an opportunity for me to go, and I was interested in something different. I loved doing Grey’s Anatomy. I would have done it until the final episode, but this was something I couldn’t pass up.”

A month after turning in his scrubs, news broke that Dane had been cast in Michael Bay’s post-apocalyptic TNT thriller The Last Ship, in which he starred as Admiral Tom Chandler for five seasons. He has returned to Grey’s in the years since his departure, appearing in a beach sequence with Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) in season 17.

Listen to Dane discuss his Grey’s dismissal in the podcast above.