Actor Eric Dane, who died in February at age 53 after a battle with ALS, wrote in his posthumous memoir that he nearly got into a physical altercation with actor Josh Duhamel on the set of the TV series “Las Vegas” in 2004.
In “My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments,” Dane recounted shooting a guest appearance on the show when he was dealing with a herniated cervical disc in his neck. Before filming a fight scene, he asked lead actor Duhamel not to grab him by the tie, and Duhamel agreed, according to excerpts reported by Entertainment Weekly.
Dane wrote that once the director called “Action,” Duhamel pulled his tie anyway. “Fire rips through my neck,” Dane wrote, describing how filming stopped and Duhamel apologized before a second take, during which the same thing happened again.
By the third take, Dane wrote, Duhamel grabbed his tie once more. “I whip off my suit coat and I say, ‘Let’s go, you p—y-ass actor,'” Dane recalled. “I ball my hands into fists and I come at him. Nobody calls ‘Cut,’ the camera keeps rolling, and to the world who sees the whole nasty scene, I’m the aggressor, the hothead, I start the fight.”
Dane listed the incident among his regrets in the book. “Josh and I have seen each other since and we’re cool,” he wrote. “But I want to say it again. Josh, I was wrong. I should’ve walked away. I’m sorry, dude.”
Dane appeared as Leo Broder during the second season of “Las Vegas,” opposite Duhamel’s character Danny McCoy, a former Marine serving as head of security at a fictional resort. Duhamel said in a September interview on “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” that his character, newly returned from Iraq that season, was “in a real dark place,” and that his own method acting “scared people a little bit, including me.” A representative for Duhamel did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Page Six.
A Years-Long Path to ALS Diagnosis
Elsewhere in the memoir, which was released Tuesday, Dane described being misdiagnosed for years before learning he had ALS. After losing use of his right hand, he saw a hand specialist, who referred him to another hand specialist, who then sent him to a neurologist.
Dane wrote that he was “shuttled from doctor to doctor” through a battery of tests before doctors reached a “diagnostic consensus” of multifocal motor neuropathy, a rare autoimmune disorder that causes severe muscle weakness and is typically treatable with 90 percent effectiveness, according to the memoir.
The treatment did not work for Dane, which he wrote left his doctors “scared.” He was ultimately diagnosed with ALS in 2024, an experience he compared to “a horror movie.”
Dane had publicly disclosed his ALS diagnosis in April 2025 before his death this past February. He is survived by his wife, Rebecca Gayheart, with whom he had called off a divorce earlier in 2025, and their two daughters, Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14.
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