When Eric Dane first appeared in the second season of Grey’s Anatomy wearing nothing but a towel, his character, Mark Sloan, was meant to be a one-hit wonder—to just be the guy Addison (Kate Walsh) cheated on Patrick Dempsey’s Derek with, full stop. But when Dane walked out of Addison’s steamy bathroom baring the V of his obliques, the audience was hooked. His hair was so sleek, stubble so precise, six-pack so clearly defined, that there was no choice but to make him a series regular, a move that was rewarded with a nickname forever embedded in pop-culture history: McSteamy. But it wasn’t just Dane’s looks that made Mark Sloan among the greatest bad boys of mid-aughts television—he had soul too. As Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes wrote in a 2012 eulogy to the character, “Eric’s Mark Sloan was dirty and hot but also completely self-aware of what he was lacking in emotion and self-control. Eric’s Mark Sloan was smart enough to know he was a man-whore and sexy enough to make the audience believe in him anyway.”
With Sloan, Dane managed to do what so few actors can: embody a role so fully that people didn’t seem to know where the character ended and the real person started. In interviews he’d get questions like, “Have you ever been in a room with a man who possessed a sexual magnetism with which you couldn't compete?” (His answer: George Clooney.) He was swiftly labeled “Hollywood's latest go-to Lothario.” And the beauty of it all was that Dane was more than game to play along with the sexed-up treatment he was getting by fans and tabloids. “It just kind of made sense,” the actor tells me over the phone from Spain. “I felt like I had an artistic obligation to not shy away from that part of the character. And to a degree, there’s a lot of me in that guy. But I think at the end of the day, you tend to give people what they’re asking for, because it’s the path of least resistance.”
By the time he left Grey’s Anatomy in 2012, it was nearly impossible to remember how many women Sloan had bedded while at Seattle Grace Hospital. (Little Grey, Callie, Addison, Teddy, Julia…and I’m already exhausted). It was so many that an entire subset of his disgruntled former fictional lovers formed the Nurses United Against Mark Sloan group. When the episode aired in 2007—a decade before the Me Too movement and our culture’s reckoning with workplace harassment—the union was played for laughs. So much so that when Sloan heard about it, he joked, “Are there any club activities?”
It’s a scene that might make us cringe in 2019, but fans of the show will probably agree that the character of Mark Sloan wasn’t a definitive Bad Man like the Weinsteins, Aileses, or Lauers of the world; he was just written in a time when combining the workplace with sex wasn’t as fraught an issue as it is today. “I never felt like Mark Sloan was a predator,” Dane says. “I never felt like Mark Sloan was looking to take advantage of anybody. I think Mark Sloan was just looking to have fun all the time. And one of the ways Mark Sloan liked to have fun was to connect with people sexually.”
Being the resident hot guy eventually started to take its creative toll. With Sloan’s death, Dane was ready to try something new. “I love that character; I just didn’t want to play that guy for the rest of my life. It’s counterintuitive to what any actor wants to do with their career,” he says. But his subsequent role, Admiral Tom Chandler on TNT’s seafaring drama The Last Ship, wasn’t exactly the departure he was looking for. Chandler was the kind of guy who would quickly go from saving his crew from a pirate minefield to kissing the hot new girl aboard the ship. Mark Sloan but make it nautical. “Then to go and do it again with this overly earnest, stoic, and heroic character, I was just like, ‘You know, this doesn’t encapsulate me as an artist,’” he says.
When that show went off the air in 2018, Dane, now 46, says he no longer felt a connection to the hyper-masculine, idealized male characters he’d been typecast as, especially because during the time he was overcoming depression and addiction, and was in the midst of a divorce. Essentially, the real-life person had changed, and Dane wanted to dig into a role that reflected that. So when Euphoria—the controversial HBO series about the often shocking interior lives of teenagers that the Parents Television Council called “a grossly irresponsible programming decision” in a warning they issued ahead of its premiere—came across his desk, he was interested.
The role up for grabs was Cal Jacobs, a family man with McSteamy-level good looks and a cookie-cutter suburban life who secretly spends time in motel rooms having anonymous sex with people—including a 17-year-old trans girl, Jules (Hunter Schafer)—he meets on dating apps using the handle DominantDaddy. Dane knew playing Cal would be the greatest challenge of his career so far but that he could also bring his own experience to it. “I understand what it’s like to lead a double life. To have secrets and to have to live keeping those secrets from people,” he says. “I’ve certainly had my struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, mental health, and I know what it’s like to have to put up a facade and have an external experience not match the internal experience. I felt like that was my strongest asset in trying to articulate what the guy’s going through.”
Though Euphoria’s Cal Jacobs is a darker, meatier role than Dane’s previous characters, it’s not lost on the viewer how the camera lingers over his most celebrated feature: his body. A body that’s a little less painstakingly defined now, and hair that’s newly silver. Mark Sloan but make him Dad. Even with the disturbing context in which we meet him, it’s clear the sheer power of his form was front and center for a reason. Much as in that Grey’s towel scene, “Cal starts out like a punch in the face,” says Dane. He towers over Jules, who lies back on the motel bed, all skin, bones, and miniskirt. While it’s not as sexy as his introduction on Grey’s, it’s undeniably just as sexual. “The common denominator is that I’m naked,” Dane says. “But it’s a lot deeper than that. With Mark Sloan, it was absolutely more of an aesthetic, and with Cal Jacobs it’s more [that] Cal wants to control and dominate.”
It’s also that Mark Sloan existed in the universe of network television, where his towel will always remain perfectly, flirtily in place. But on Euphoria—which came under fire for having a scene that shows a total of 30 penises in one sequence—the sex is gritty and isn’t always fun to watch. It’s not “hanky-panky” in an on-call room during a graveyard shift; it’s two people acting out their most forbidden desires. It’s angry and rough, and it leaves neither truly satisfied. And Dane was willing to go the extra mile it took to portray that. “I want to do whatever I can to keep the story as truthful and honest as I can,” he says. “Obviously, I’m going to wear a prosthetic if I’m working with another actor, but there was an isolated shot where I [was alone] so I didn’t have to [wear a prosthetic]. I simply said, ‘If it’s going to be better if I’m not in the prosthetic—if it’s going to be more organic, sincere, or truthful—then I’m willing to do that.’”
The decision to wear a prosthetic was informed by an intimacy coordinator, whose job it is to advocate for the well-being of actors participating in sex scenes. It’s a position that, as of fall 2018, HBO has required on all sets, and one that felt especially necessary on Euphoria, a show so extreme that one actor reportedly quit midshoot. Dane found that having the intimacy coordinator on set was helpful, and that it created a safety net for him, particularly while working with Schafer in her first-ever role (he calls the actor “fantastic” and says he recently texted to tell her how “spectacular” and “fun” she is to watch onscreen). But really, Dane doesn’t mind a sex scene (“I’ve always been comfortable with these types of scenes; that’s my final answer,” he tells me when I ask him why he’s so at ease). He then adds, “Part of my comfort comes from me being vigilant that my scene partner’s comfortable. Because if that person’s not comfortable, it’s going to create some discomfort for me, and the sincerity and the intimacy isn’t going to be there.”
He’s also seemingly just as comfortable with his sexuality in his personal life. In 2009, a video leaked of Dane, his then wife actor Rebecca Gayheart, and another woman naked in a bathtub. For five years Dane chose not to comment publicly on the subject. Then in 2014 he told People, “We’ve all made mistakes. My one regret is that I got the person I love most wrapped up in all that: Rebecca.”
But when I asked him whether he believes, in 2019, that the tape was a mistake, he seemed happy to clarify. “I often think about that answer I gave. And looking back now, was it a mistake? Absolutely not. Three consenting adults, one of them being my wife? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was most likely referring to the drug use that was alluded to in the video, and was that a mistake? Again, I don’t necessarily think I was breaking any laws and corrupting anybody. We were just three people taking a bath.” Dane then adds a disclaimer that seems to sum up his stance on the totality of his past, “I didn’t regret it. I have no regrets nor do I make any apologies for my life experience. It’s my life experience and I am at peace with all of it.”
Yet despite the fact that so many people have seen so much of him, Dane, once again, is at peace with it. Though there are countless articles dedicated to the shirtless photos of him, and the fact that some Euphoria fans want Cal Jacobs to—and I quote—“destroy them,” Dane has never felt objectified by any of it. He’s always viewed himself as a willing participant and feels that it’s “sort of critical for the story.” And with Euphoria—and what these sex scenes reveal about the character—Dane believes it’s absolutely critical for the story.
Because this time it’s not just about being eye candy, having a racy plot line, or someone simply getting off. It’s about “something that transcend[s] the two naked bodies. It’s less about two people crashing into each other, and more about the feelings that are going on.”
Samantha Leach is the assistant culture editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @_sleach.
