Eric Dane said he first shut down emotionally at just 7 years old, when navigating his father’s sudden death from a gunshot wound in a bathroom at his family’s home.

It wasn’t until his diagnosis with ALS decades later that the seasoned actor felt his own spirit return, Dane said in an interview released Friday on Netflix. The actor died Thursday at 53 following a public battle with the disease. The nearly hour-long interview, filmed in November, is part of the docuseries “Famous Last Words,” which features posthumous interviews with notable figures — the first centered on conservationist Jane Goodall and released two days after her death.

The actor spoke candidly about his debilitating disease, saying it “made me a little bit softer, a little bit more open.” The intimate conversation was conducted by television producer Brad Falchuk, who executive produces “Famous Last Words.”

“All I’m left with is me,” Dane said. “It’s kind of a f— up way of realizing that you were enough the whole time, when everything gets taken away and all you have left is this person.”

In the episode, Dane’s speech is noticeably slurred, and he sits in a motorized wheelchair while speaking to Falchuk. He’s thoughtful and responsive throughout as he reflects on his life and career, which spanned more than three decades.

“I didn’t think this was gonna be the end of the road for me. This was never part of the story I created for myself,” Dane said.

The actor described himself as a complainer during the interview, adding that he’s “always historically been the guy that would b— and moan on his way to doing anything, but my spirit has been surprisingly pretty buoyant throughout this journey.”

A final message to his daughters

Dane stared straight into the camera in the last few minutes of the Netflix special, his voice wavering when tears welled up in his eyes. He directed his parting words to his two daughters, Billie, 15, and Georgia, 14, sharing four lessons he’s learned from ALS.

“Billie and Georgia, you are my heart. You are my everything. Good night. I love you. Those are my last words,” Dane said.

Dane married Rebecca Gayheart, the mother of his children, in 2004 and the couple separated in 2017, though the divorce was never finalized. They maintained a friendship after their separation, though, and Dane said he had “never fallen in love with another woman as deeply as I fell in love with Rebecca.”

Dane said he spent most of his life “wallowing and worrying in self-pity, shame and doubt.” But with ALS, he was “forced to stay in the present,” he said, which he encouraged his daughters to do.

“I don’t want to be anywhere else. The past contains regrets. The future remains unknown, so you have to live now,” Dane said. “The present is all you have. Treasure it. Cherish every moment.”

Dane also encouraged his daughters to fall in love, not just with people, but with something “that makes you want to get up in the morning,” he said. For Dane, that love was acting, which “eventually got me through my darkest hours, my darkest days, my darkest year,” he said.

The actor, who was open about his struggles with addiction, had been sober for nine years before slipping back into drug and alcohol use during a writer’s strike that halted “Grey’s Anatomy” production in 2007.

Dane told his daughters they inherited his resilience and urged them to “fight with every ounce of your being, and with dignity.”

Dane added: “This disease is slowly taking my body, but it will never take my spirit.”

ALS diagnosis brought peace

Aside from throwing a few punches to people who “deserved it,” Dane said he had no crazy confessions to make as the interview came to a close.

“I’ve never murdered anyone, Brad,” the actor joked to Falchuk.

The actor assured he lived a life full of fun, whether healthy or unhealthy. His fruitful career took off with his role as Dr. Mark “McSteamy” Sloan in “Grey’s Anatomy.” The gig started as a one-time guest role but “ignited a fan hysteria so intense,” Falchuk said, that the show was rewritten to make Dane a leading man.

Dane further cemented his legacy when he portrayed Cal Jacobs in “Euphoria,” a complicated character who leads a double life, which Dane said he related to. “I know what it’s like to not have my inside match my outside,” he said, referencing his long-standing battle with drugs and alcohol addiction.

His ALS diagnosis freed him from a constant state of self-judgment, Dane said, and helped him realize that he was always “absolutely more than enough.”

“I hope I’ve demonstrated that you can face anything. You can face the end of your days, you can face hell, with dignity,” he said.

I happen to find detective shows boring; they just never thrilled me. I have long grown apart from it, but as a kid, I studied a lot about different serial killers. None of it fit my style of seeing real crime scene photos that don’t hold back. With that in mind, Strange Harvest is several stories in one.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

Detectives are thrust into a chilling hunt for “Mr. Shiny”-a sadistic serial killer from the past whose return marks the beginning of a new wave of grotesque, otherworldly crimes tied to a dark cosmic force.

With FX that would impress even Tom Savini himself, the film really grew on me. At first, I was unimpressed, thinking it was the usual cops and robbers type movie. However, the film quickly grabbed my attention. From the first few minutes, I was really excited to watch. The very first crime scene photos were life-changing in a movie or show quite like this.  Strange Harvest became even better as we got further into the film. Besides the dead bodies, the film really did make me feel as if this were a true story. The realism caught me off guard, and oftentimes, I found something to trigger me.

Though there were some really uncomfortanle scenes that broke the unwritten horror rules. The film quickly sucked me back in, however. The entire premise could easily happen to anyone; we already know the big names of serial killer history, but not the ones, such as this, that fly under the radar. They happen every day, somewhere in the world. So we already know the evil minds still exist today. Strange Harvest actually spooked me quite a bit. It was a good thing I watched it with the lights on, because some parts of the movie made me sleep with one eye open, watching the window all night.

The last film that got into my head was the first Paranormal Activity. Strange Harvest not only made me paranoid, but I was also afraid for days. Strange Harvest was one step away from intrusive thoughts; however, the film impressed me with fear. This wasn’t some heavy-footed steps; this was realism, and normally I hate those types of films. It was made for you to feel uncomfortable, but it also doesn’t blur the line between realism and fantasy.

In The End

In the end, I really enjoyed the film. It gave me a new view on detective-related shows and films. Strange Harvest is going into my list of movies in rotation when I work and need a great background noise; a perception that I loved this, but not too many others. I know there are some movies with masked villains chasing someone around with an array of tools and tricks. I easily recommend this film, which you can find on Hulu.

Heed my warning, however, because you are about to enter a new world. A world that should stick to the horror genre forever. Maybe I am hyping it up just a tad, but it doesn’t keep me from being a fan.

The nominated Oscar shorts come in three categories — and a lot of subjects, styles and temperaments. It’s further proof that an award dictated by length needn’t be bound by anything else.

In the live-action category, a mixed bag of approaches — some inspired by classic literature — are burnished by inspired performances. Lee Knight’s “A Friend of Dorothy” may be a tad on the nose about the cultural and emotional impact of a lonely London widow on a closeted teenaged boy. But leads Miriam Margolyes and Alistair Nwachukwu practically shimmer with humor and warmth. “Jane Austen’s Period Drama,” a loving tweak of the writer’s oeuvre from Steve Pinder and Julia Aks (who also stars), is essentially a one-joke calling card to make feature comedies and it should do the job. Its cast is exactly the sprightly ensemble needed to land its what-if laughs.

Two others just miss the mark in terms of bringing their tensions to powerful resolutions yet benefit from who the camera adores. Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” centered on a flimsy accusation against a friendly Palestinian butcher in an Israeli market, undercuts its gripping story with lackadaisical filmmaking and an unnecessary subplot, but lead Omar Sameer is commanding. The black-and-white future shock “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is an uneven Euro-art bath of unrealized intimacy and casual violence — kissing is punishable by death, slapping is currency — but is given exquisite tautness by the elegant, unrequited swooniness of stars Zar Amir and Luana Bajrami.

Then there’s my favorite, Sam A. Davis’ likely winner “The Singers,” from Ivan Turgenev’s short story, which pays off handsomely in bites of soulful warbling that briefly turn a barroom’s den of anesthesia into a temple of feeling.

Most of this year’s documentary nominees deal with the grimmest of tragedies, as in “All the Empty Rooms” and “Children No More: Were and Are Gone,” which address the remembrance of children brutally killed. The former film, from Joshua Seftel, follows CBS correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on an essay project into the bedrooms of kids gunned down in school shootings, their private worlds heartbreakingly preserved by their families. The latter short, directed by Hilla Medalia, witnesses Tel Aviv’s silent vigils for Gaza’s children, protests marked by posters with beaming faces, and sometimes met with open scorn. These are dutiful, sobering acts of mourning — Seftel’s is the probable awardee. You may wish they were more than that, however, considering the issues (guns, war, political intransigence) that created the devastation.

Combat is what drove award-winning photojournalist Brent Renaud, killed in Ukraine in 2022. But his brother Craig’s memorializing of him, “Armed Only With a Camera,” is oddly uninvolving, more an excerpted flipbook of Brent’s far-flung assignments than a meaningful portrait of excelling at a dangerous job. A more affecting real-world dispatch (and my pick, if I could vote) is “The Devil Is Busy,” directed by Christalyn Hampton and dual nominee Geeta Gandbhir, also up for the feature “The Perfect Neighbor.” It observes a day in the operation of a carefully guarded, female-run Georgia abortion clinic as if it were a newly medieval world’s last chance healthcare outpost, getting by on grit, compassion and prayer. You certainly won’t forget security head Tracii, the clinic’s heavyhearted knight and guide.

A scene from “Perfectly a Strangeness,” nominated in the documentary short category.

(Roadside Attractions)

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Your chaser is Alison McAlpine’s appealing, aptly titled “Perfectly a Strangeness,” sans humans, but starring three donkeys in an unnamed desert happening upon a cluster of hilltop observatories. The whir of science meets the wonder of nature and this charming, gorgeously shot ode to discovery (both on Earth and out there) makes one hope the motion picture academy sees fit to recognize more imaginative nonfiction works going forward.

Animation, of course, thrives on the thrill of conjured worlds, like the one in Konstantin Bronzit’s wordless (but not soundless) desert island farce “The Three Sisters.” It owes nothing to Chekhov — though there are seagulls — but much to a classically Russian sense of humor and a Chaplinesque ingenuity. Elsewhere, you can watch the overly cute Christian homily “Forevergreen,” from Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears, about a nurturing tree, a restless bear and the dangerous allure of potato chips. The message gets muddled but this eco-conscious journey is charming.

It’s tough to predict a winner when the entrants are this strong, but John Kelly’s “Retirement Plan” feasts on wry relatability, as Domhnall Gleeson narrates a paunchy middle-aged man’s ambitious post-career goals, while the cascade of deadpan funny, thickly-lined and mundanely hued images stress a more poignant, finite reality. In its all-too-human view of life, this is, entertainingly, whatever the opposite of a cloying graduation speech is.

A scene from “Retirement Plan,” nominated in the animated short category.

(Roadside Attractions)

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The spindly aged-doll puppetry in the stop-motion gem “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” marks a sly fable of need, greed and destiny, centered on a wealthy grandfather’s Dickensian fashioning of his poverty-stricken childhood in early 19th century Montreal. Filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski find an enchanting balance between storybook allure and adult trickery. Maybe this one steals it?

Whichever the case, the animation that moved me the most is “Butterfly,” from Florence Miailhe, imagining the last, memory-laden swim of Jewish French-Algerian athlete Alfred Nakache, who competed in the Olympics before and after the Holocaust. In the cocooning fluidity of an ocean-borne day, rendered with thick-brushed painterliness and splashes of sound, we travel across flashes of community, injustice, achievement, love and despair. The visual, thematic constant, though, is water as a haven and a poetic life force that feeds renewal.