Eric Dane Says He Was ‘Let Go’ From ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ While Battling Addiction

Eric Dane has revealed that it wasn’t his choice to leave Grey’s Anatomy back in 2012.

The actor, who played Mark “McSteamy” Sloan for six seasons of the ABC sitcom, says he was “let go” from the medical drama.

“I didn’t leave so much as I think I was let go,” he told Dax Shepard during an episode of the Armchair Expert podcast.

He added that he had been struggling with drug addiction at the time.

“They didn’t let me go because of that,” he added, “although it definitely didn’t help.”

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.”

Dane says he has nothing but love for Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes, sharing that “she protected us fiercely.”

“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 has been open about his sobriety journey and 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.”

When Dane left the series, he told EW at the time that he was leaving the series 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.”

Just a month after he left Grey’s Anatomy, Dance was cast in Michael Bay‘s TNT series The Last Ship, in which he starred as Admiral Tom Chandler for five seasons. He made a surprise appearance on Grey’s in Season 17 for a beach scene with Meredith (Ellen Pompeo).