‘Grey’s Anatomy’ heartthrob confronts ALS — and hopes to help others

After six seasons starring as the sexy doctor known as “McSteamy” on “Grey’s Anatomy,” Eric Dane has received all kinds of feedback from fans. But his favorite is the comment he hears regularly: “I went through med school because of that show.”

The legacy of the long-running hospital soap opera continues — ABC rolls out Season 22 Oct. 9 — but the sentiment means something different now to Dane, who has gained a new window into the world of medicine since his diagnosis last year of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease that strikes at muscle control and progressively limits the ability to move, walk, speak and breathe.

Dane, 52, first noticed his symptoms in early 2024 when he felt an unexplained weakness in his hand. As much as he would have preferred to keep his devastating health crisis private, he knew he should get ahead of the Hollywood rumor mill. In April, he gave a statement to People magazine, and a couple of months later, sat for an interview with Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.”

“It wasn’t something I ever really wanted to do. It was something I felt like I had to do,” Dane told The Washington Post this week. “It was getting increasingly difficult to hide what was going on. And instead of letting people speculate what was happening, I just said it. … And I’ve never experienced a bigger outpouring of love and support than I have after I announced that.”

He also realized there was something else he could do by talking about ALS publicly: He could help others in the same situation feel less alone. And he could use his fame to draw notice to the efforts to raise money to find a cure for the terminal disease.

Dane spoke to The Post on Tuesday at the St. Regis hotel shortly before heading to Capitol Hill with an advocacy group to lobby members of Congress to reauthorize the four-year-old Accelerating Access for Critical Therapies for ALS Act, which boosts federal funds and establishes grant programs for ALS research. The law, known as ACT for ALS, expires September 2026, and advocates hope to avoid any delays in funding.

“We’re on this cusp of ALS progress right now. So it’s a really important moment for us to be able to leverage Eric’s celebrity to raise awareness of the disease, which leads us to more attention, funding and support, and make sure we reauthorize this bill,” said Andrea Goodman, chief executive of I Am ALS, the organization that partnered with Dane.

“ACT for ALS has been transformational in the progress in this disease in so many ways; it’s given patients around the country hope because they can now access promising treatments. And it set the stage for this new research infrastructure that we have to protect and sustain.”

Even on the eve of a government shutdown, Dane had the ability to command attention from members of Congress. His McSteamy storyline coincided with “Grey’s” peak cultural relevance 20 years ago, when its early seasons regularly averaged 20 million viewers an episode.

Dane arrived in Season 2 and was soon cemented in TV history with a debut scene in which he walked out of the bathroom wearing only a strategically placed towel, steam billowing behind him. (Series creator Shonda Rhimes has said it’s one of her favorite moments of the show.) He has also appeared in movies including “X-Men: The Last Stand” and “Valentine’s Day,” and Gen Z now knows him as Nate Jacobs’s dad on HBO’s teen nightmare-fuel drama “Euphoria.”

His candor about his illness is no surprise to fans who followed him through past challenges. Dane made no secret of going to rehab in 2011 to wean himself off pain medication, and he opened up about the role his addiction issues probably played in producers’ decision to write his character out of “Grey’s Anatomy” in 2012. He and his wife, actress Rebecca Gayheart, announced a split in 2018, though they dismissed the divorce petition this year; they have two teenage daughters.

Dane, seated in an armchair at the St. Regis and sporting a distinguished-looking head of gray hair and tinted glasses, spoke deliberately and thoughtfully throughout the interview. Earlier this year, he told “GMA” that his right arm had stopped working, and he had a sense that his left hand was going.

He was originally scheduled to present at the Emmy Awards in mid-September with his former “Grey’s” co-star Jesse Williams to mark the show’s 20th anniversary but missed the ceremony. Fans wondered about his absence. Dane told The Post that shortly before the telecast, he lost his balance and fell hard in his kitchen.

“ALS is a nasty disease. … So I was in the hospital during the Emmys getting stitches put in my head,” Dane said. “I missed an opportunity I was really looking forward to. It would have been great to see Jesse and get reunited with some of my peers, and to be able to present in front of my colleagues I thought would have a been special moment. So I was a really upset about it, but you know, there was nothing I could do about it.”

“You should make special note that he came to D.C. two days later,” interjected Dan Tate Jr., who was sitting next to Dane at the St. Regis.

Tate, a fellow ALS patient who accompanied Dane to the Hill, spent 25 years working in government relations and is the founder of a public affairs advocacy firm. Indeed, within days of his injury, Dane was in Washington for his first of two visits to Capitol Hill. He returned again this week to meet with more members of Congress.

Although President Donald Trump’s White House has proposed dramatic cuts to biomedical research that could affect ALS funding, Tate said that the ACT for ALS bill was one of the most widely supported pieces of legislation in Congress during its session in 2021. During both of his trips to the Hill, Dane met with representatives and senators from both sides of the aisle, and he told the legislators he was going to “fight to the last breath on this one.”

“So far, we’re seeing enormous support from bipartisan champions for ALS,” Goodman said.

Dane has found it gratifying to work with I Am ALS (founded by ALS patient Brian Wallach and his wife, Sandra Abrevaya, former staffers in President Barack Obama’s White House) and recently became the nonprofit’s spokesperson to urge the three-year “Push for Progress” campaign.

He has heard from many people affected by the disease; according to the organization, 30,000 Americans are living with ALS, and patients typically live an average of two to five years after the diagnosis.

“It’s, unfortunately, the same story when I hear from people. It’s like, ‘I lost my father, mother, cousin, brother, friend,'” Dane said. “It’s never, ‘My father, mother, cousin, brother, friend has been living with it for 10 years now.’”

Dane still hopes he can provide some comfort to others. He knows he’s luckier than most, that he has resources and access to the best medical care, and hopes the spotlight on him can have a bigger purpose.

“I have been an open book about certain things in my life. This is something I felt compelled to share with people,” Dane said. “I don’t really have a dog in the fight, per se, when it comes to worrying about what people are going think about me. This is more of a: ‘How can I help? How can I be of some service?’

“Not to be overly morbid,” he added. “but you know, if I’m going out, I’m gonna go out helping somebody.”