“That’s how things started to go wrong”: Eric Dane (Mark Sloan) looks back on his departure from Grey’s Anatomy, 12 years ago – News Series

Dr. Sloan said goodbye to Seattle Grace 12 years ago! In 2012, Grey’s Anatomy fans discovered that Sloan (Eric Dane) and Lexie (Chyler Leigh) were leaving the show, one during the tragic finale of season 8, the other at the beginning of season 9.

At the same time, behind the scenes, Eric Dane was having a lot of personal problems, which he opened up about in the podcast Armchair Expert (relayed by our colleagues from TVLine) :

“You’re starting to cost a lot.”

Over the eight years I was on Grey’s Anatomy, I was high more often than I was sober. And that’s when things started to go downhill for me.

“I think I was let go”he continues. “I was starting to cost the network a lot of money. And the network knew that the series would continue to [rapporter autant], whether I continued to be there or not. As long as they had their Grey, everything was fine.”

I wasn’t the guy they hired anymore. So I figured they were letting me go. And Shonda [Rhimes] was perfect. She was extremely protective of us, publicly and privately. But I probably got fired. It wasn’t ceremonious like ‘you’re fired’, it was just ‘you’re not coming back’.

“We didn’t want him to die,” said the series creator.

At the time of Dane’s departure in 2012, Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator, explained: “I had a number of options for how Mark could exit the show, but any option involving his death required us to have a) a fairly indefinite grieving process on Lexie’s part and b) him voluntarily distancing himself from his daughter.

We fought about this incessantly in the Writing Room. We didn’t want him to die, but as the writers rightly told me, Mark couldn’t abandon Sofia and certainly couldn’t abandon Callie after Arizona’s leg was amputated.”

Remember that Callie was Mark’s best friend, Sofia his biological daughter, and Lexie the woman he was in love with, and who passed away while he was holding her hand following the terrible plane crash at the end of season 8.

The devastated hero will succumb to his injuries at the start of season 9, alongside the inconsolable Derek and Callie. Just like fans of the cult series.

Since Grey’s Anatomy, Eric Dane has notably appeared in Euphoria, in the role of the father of Nate Jacobs, played by Jacob Elordi.