But I’m not in high school, so I don’t deal with any of that. It’s me and Jacob, and maybe a look with me and Z. There have been reports that certain actors didn’t get along with Sam during the making of Season 2, and therefore you did not see them feature as prominently, like Barbie Ferreira. I’ve never had an experience on set playing this character where I’ve come home and felt awful about it. But we keep it pretty light in-between takes. The dialogue’s different but we’re pretty tight, so the on-screen dynamic is very evident when we work together. That’s kind of the way we are off-set too. You and Jacob Elordi do have special chemistry on the show. I had to fake it like I was scratching my back while I was peeing so I can uncrimp this line and the pee could come out, and then I had to go back again and turn it off. There was a crimp on a tube that I had to uncrimp. It was weird working that rig to make it pee.
They just brought it out, I said, “This is a good penis, let’s use that one,” and that was it. I met Sam and we spoke about it for 45 minutes, and after I left, as the story goes, he called HBO and said, “I found Cal.” My internal experience is very different from my external experience and I want to work on projects that challenge me.” My agent, Josh Lieberman, who also represents Zendaya, told me about this great pilot for this HBO show called Euphoria. I met with my representatives after about a year and I said, “Ultimately, I’m the one who makes the decisions here, but I think we’re doing this all wrong. But I took a year off of everything after The Last Ship because I felt like what I was doing wasn’t making me happy and I needed to rethink a lot of things. I don’t refer to them as “kids,” I refer to them as “young adults,” because most of them really have their shit together. Well, Z has been working a long time, too.
How did you land the role of Cal on Euphoria? Because when the series first dropped, you were really the acting veteran among the group. But more than anything, he feels reinvigorated by his stint on Euphoria, which may earn him his first Emmy nomination. He just wrapped National Anthem, an upcoming film he shot in Albuquerque that also features Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney, the pop star Halsey, Simon Rex, and Paul Walter Hauser. I’m seated in a booth with Dane at a tony restaurant inside the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. “I felt I had more to offer than that, and Euphoria has been inspiring, and challenging, and at times difficult-and worth it.” “It’s counterintuitive to play the same character over and over and over again, and that’s what I felt like I was doing,” he says. Tom Chandler, the leader of a Navy vessel navigating a deadly pandemic in The Last Ship. Mark Sloan, aka “McSteamy,” on Grey’s Anatomy, or Capt. I’m a neurotic Jew underneath it all.”įor years, the 49-year-old actor felt boxed-in playing roles like Dr. I still don’t really know what it means.” He pauses.
“I get a lot of, ‘I feel weird saying this, but I love you on Euphoria,’” says Dane, adding, “Apparently I’m a ‘Zaddy.’ That’s what I get called sometimes-or so I’ve heard. Dane plays Cal, a closeted father whose fetish for filming his sexual encounters with young gay men and transgender women, including the statutory rape of a 17-year-old Jules (Hunter Schafer), has done a number on his son, Nate (Jacob Elordi). Sam Levinson’s series follows a group of interconnected teens at the fictional East Highland High School-led by Rue (Zendaya), a recovering drug addict-as they navigate first love, trauma, addiction, familial strife, and heartbreak. “It’s crazy,” he says in his potent baritone. When I mention those statistics to Eric Dane, he grins widely.
Each episode averaged around 16.3 million viewers, making it the second most-watched show in HBO history behind Game of Thrones, and the season attracted over 30 million tweets, leading Twitter to crown it “the most-tweeted-about TV show of the decade so far in the U.S.” In only its second season, Euphoria became a bona fide cultural phenomenon.